SMALL PRINT:A COMMON contraceptive drug could do more than prevent pregnancy – new findings from University College Cork and Trinity College Dublin suggest it can also bolster light-detecting cells in the eye in mouse models of degenerative blindness.
The study, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, found that the drug Norgestrel, a synthetic progestin commonly used in hormonal contraception, could help prevent a type of cell-death called apoptosis in retinal cells growing in the lab.
Then the researchers went on to find that in mice that model the degenerative eye condition retinitis pigmentosa, which can lead to blindness as light-detecting cells in the retina die, Norgestrel appeared to protect the light-detecting cells.
“The drug seems to work by stimulating the production of a protein survival factor called FGF from neighbouring cells in the eye and this helps the light-detecting cells to survive and the animals to see,” says Prof Tom Cotter from UCC’s biochemistry department.
“It ‘beefs up’ the cells, makes them stronger and better able to resist the destructive effects of the damaged gene that causes the disease. At the moment we still don’t know if the drug will also work in humans.”
The scientists hope to begin a study next year to see if the protective effects of the contraceptive that are seen in animal models are also experienced by humans, according to a release from UCC.
The research was supported by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland, and Fighting Blindness Ireland, and will now be extended to other eye conditions, such as glaucoma, with funding from the Health Research Board.
– Claire O’Connell
SEE THE PICTURE of an eye above? When you look at them, neurons are probably firing in the right-hand section of your amygdala – a structure in the brain that’s linked to emotion.
That’s if the results of a new study are anything to go by – it showed that specific portions of the amygdala light up in response to images of animals. Part of the study involved 41 adult patients undergoing epilepsy monitoring who had electrodes implanted in their brains.
The consenting participants took part in the research by sitting in bed and looking at hundreds of images on a laptop. The pictures included people, animals, objects and landmarks, and the researchers recorded the responses.
What became apparent is that neurons in the right-hand portion of the amygdala fired in response to images of animals. “Neurons in the amygdala responded preferentially to pictures of animals rather than to pictures of other stimulus categories,” write the study authors in Nature Neuroscience, who note that both “aversive and cute” animals elicited a response.
The researchers used fnuctional MRI imaging to see how the brains of 10 healthy adult volunteers lit up in response to images of animals or non-animals – and again the right amygdala responded more strongly to animals. “Our results demonstrate that the right amygdala is specialised for processing visual information about animals,” write the researchers, who are based in the US, Germany, the UK, Israel and South Korea.
They also surmise that the selectivity of the response “may reflect the importance that animals held throughout our evolutionary past.”
- Claire O’Connell