Blindness risk warning to smokers
Updated on 25 February 2008
People at risk of damaging their sight or going blind in later life through smoking are now identifiable, scientists have announced.
Boffins at Queen's University in Belfast have determined how much the risk of a type of vision loss in the over 65s is due to gene variation and smoking.
They claim GPs could halve the numbers at risk of going blind by getting them to give up smoking.
The leading cause of vision loss in the elderly occurs when the central region of the retina - the macula - deteriorates. It is known as age-related macula degeneration or AMD.
Queen's professor Anne Hughes and her team in Medical Genetics and Vision Sciences at the Royal Victoria Hospital have reported the risk of AMD in old age can be predicted from a combination of genes and smoking levels.
The professor said: "The macula is the tissue at the back of the eye that converts light into electrical messages and sends them into the brain. AMD destroys the central vision that is needed for reading and driving, leaving only dim, blurred images or a black hole at the centre of vision."
She added: "In our study of 401 AMD patients and 266 people with good vision, we found it is possible to predict an individual's risk of developing AMD."
Her team asked each person about their smoking status and catalogued inherited sequence variations in their DNA - and also examined groups of gene variants known as haplotypes which are present on chromosomes.
The research confirmed the two most important gene regions affecting AMD risk. She said while it would be difficult to prevent the degeneration of the macula until more was known about how the genes acted, it was clear those with a high genetic risk of AMD should try to control their smoking.
Professor Hughes said: "The results of this research provide physicians with a way to identify those at the highest genetic risk of developing AMD. They can then step up their efforts to persuade these people to avoid smoking, thereby more than halving their risk of becoming blind."
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