5 Things We Learned This Month:

1. Ultrawide field imaging may enable better and earlier diagnosis of disease progression in diabetic patients
Peripheral retinal lesions may predict diabetic patients’ risk of disease progression – and spotting them using ultrawide field imaging could allow better diagnosis, staging and monitoring of diabetic retinopathy, according to one study.
 
2. Current retinoblastoma therapies increase secondary cancer risk – but there could be an alternative
Although highly successful, retinoblastoma radio- and chemotherapy increases the risk of secondary cancer. Now, a new target for therapy – a transcription factor called EZH2 – might offer an alternative.
 
3. Object motion detector cell function relies on an interneuron and a special 'sidekick' protein
The way the brain and the eye work together to create an image of the world around us is still, in many ways, a mystery – but new research is shining a light on the mechanisms behind one aspect of vision: near motion sensing.
 
4. Two teams have developed very different approaches to retinitis pigmentosa, but both look promising…
Around one in 5,000 people suffers from a retinal dystrophy, making it a prime target for research into preventing vision loss, and restoring vision – and recently published work pertaining to both holds great promise.
 
5. In patients with keratoconus, CXL halts progression up to seven years on
Corneal collagen cross-linking (CXL) has been used to treat corneal ectasias since 2003. Twelve years on, a prospective cohort study has shown that CXL-induced improvements (in both refractive and topographic measures) observed after one year afterwards were maintained at five and seven years out.