Friday, June 1, 2012

Retinitis Pigmentosa

           I accidentally purchased the wrong book for this class, and before I realized it was wrong, I began reading an article inside of it titled "The Man who could not See Stars".  I thought the title was interesting.  The story is about a man who loved to go out and look at the night sky.  He knew that he could see better with his peripheral vision than when he looked directly at it.  One day, he realized that if he looked out of the corner of his eye, that he could no longer see his favorite star.  He noticed some signs that something was wrong, like he had trouble driving at night, and when he went to the movies, it took his eyes forever to adjust to the darkness.  The man was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease where the death of photoreceptors and degeneration of the epithelium occur.  The rods in the eye are affected before the cones are.  The disease spreads vision loss to the fovea, and this can lead to total blindness. 
             I was looking for more about this disease, and stumbled upon a blog of a woman who was diagnosed with this disease.  I found it very interesting. 

Luci Walks Blog

1 comment:

  1. Luci i found your blog very interesting because i did my blog on functions and parts of the eye. Retinitis pigmentosa is a scary disease it is unfortunate that this man had to experience this, i could not imagine not having my vision.

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