Macular Degeneration Treatment Tips

Natural macular treatment, with foods and supplements, is beneficial for your eyes and your sight
* as a treatment or prevention strategy on its own
* to support your eye health during surgery or other medical forms of treatment for macular degeneration.

In this site you’ll learn about the vision-specific nutrients that help eye health - see our ‘Eye Health Nutrients’ posts on Antioxidant Nutrition, Lutein, and Bilberry. Now let’s look at Ginkgo Biloba herb.

Ginkgo Biloba (named from the Japanese ‘yin-kwo’, meaning ’silver fruit’) is in fact the maidenhair tree, native to Japan, China and Korea. It was introduced to Europe in around 1730. Now ginkgo biloba leaf extract is widely used as a medicinal herb throughout the world.

What are bilberry vitamins? What benefits do they have for your eyes and how can they help in macular degeneration treatment? Read this to find out why you’ll want to make sure bilberry is in the supplement you take for your vision.

Bilberry is a plant (vaccinium myrtillus), and its fruit is used in eyesight vitamins.

We picked and ate bilberries when I was growing up in England. We found them growing close to the ground on hillsides - small, round, dark purple-blue edible berries, on plants with small leaves and little pinkish flowers. Bilberries are related to blueberries and huckleberries and many more Vaccinium species.

They have an age-old reputation for improving vision.

Bilberries improve your:

    •    night vision
    •    vision in dim light
    •    sharpness of vision
    •    fine detail work
    •    intense use of eyes, like in daily computer work

How do bilberry vitamins do this? They:

    •    strengthen the retina and support its healthy function
    •    improve the strength and integrity of blood vessels
    •    reduce the risk of damage to the microcirculation of the eye, by protecting blood vessels
    •    improve circulation
    •    contain high levels of antioxidants

It has been claimed that bilberries contain the highest level of antioxidants of any berry.

The blue-purple pigment of bilberries is caused by their high concentration of the bioflavonoid anthocyanin. This is a powerful antioxidant which has a special affinity for your eyes.

Anthocyanins protect body tissues, particularly blood vessels, from oxidizing agents. (See our posts on Antioxidant Nutrition).

History of improved night vision

British pilots in the Royal Air Force during World War II used to eat bilberry jam. They claimed it improved their night vision.

Bilberry vitamins are used to treat eye conditions including night blindness, diabetic retinopathy and cataracts, as well as macular degeneration. Here’s just one example of a study of how bilberry vitamins help in macular degeneration:

Researchers gave bilberry extract to 31 people with various retinal problems including wet macular degeneration. The abnormal capillaries in their eyes became stronger and less likely to leak and cause scarring. (Scharrer, A. et al. "Anthocyanosides in the Treatment of Reinopathies," Klin. Monastabl Augenheilkd (German) (1981) 178:386).

Because bilberry can thin the blood (which is beneficial in many instances) you must be careful if you have any bleeding disorders. Consult your healthcare practitioner if this applies to you.

Lets take a quick look at a couple of these reports in the context of macular degeneration treatments.

The March 4 issue of the ‘Journal of Neuroscience’ carries a study on how the brain changes when its inputs change.

"Neurons seem to ‘want’ to receive input: when their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing,” said Nancy Kanwisher, at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and senior author of the above study.

This study and others found that when neurons in the visual cortex no longer receive input from central vision, they can start to respond instead to other areas receiving light stimuli.

"If scientists could one day develop technologies to replace the lost light-sensitive cells in the fovea, patients might be able to recover central vision since the neurons there are still alive and well", according to a Newswise press release on this report.

You can read the whole press release at http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/549515/

Another study that appeared in the December issue of ‘Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience’ was run by the Georgia Institute of Technology. It tested how volunteers with macular degeneration made up for their loss of central vision by focusing with other parts of their visual field (known as preferred retinal locations).

The conclusion was that the brain reorganized itself.

This was the first study which directly showed that this ‘brain remapping’ in people with eye degeneration disease related to their own behavior. In other words, the very way in which macular degeneration patients tried to see with areas outside their central vision helped their brains to reorganize. They ‘retrained’ the visual cortex in their brains.

This sounds encouraging. The Georgia Tech research group are now studying how long such a process takes, and whether ‘low-vision training’ can further support it.

Certainly it’s worth exploring these possibilities. There’s more than one way to approach macular degeneration treatments. We keep looking into what’s being developed, as well as continuing with the known improvers of vision: diet and macular vitamins.