In a paper just published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ashtari et al. report the astonishing findings of their study on how the visual cortex responds to recovery of retinal function after prolonged sensory deprivation, and provide the spectacular initial evidence that the visual cortex can be made responsive to visual input even after prolonged visual deprivation (up to 35 years. The research provides an excellent demonstration that gene augmentation therapy in humans with LCA2 rendered both the retina and the visual cortex far more sensitive to dimmer light and lower-contrast stimuli. The finding that the visual cortex can be reawakened after chronic visual deprivation in a rare eye disease may have much broader implications, providing promise for the outcome of gene therapy for both early- and late-onset retinal degenerative diseases.
You can read the abstract of the article at
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