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Vitamin C: one of the Dietary Factors in preventing Macular Degeneration
Related: anti-oxidant, electrolytes, eyesight, health, macular degeneration, magnesium, nutrition, Vitamin C
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WSJ: New Treatments for Macular Degeneration Are On the Way
Scientists may be just a few years away from delivering new treatments for age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of irreversible vision loss in people more than 50 years old.
...“I’m cautiously optimistic that we will have markedly improved treatments for both wet and dry AMD within two to three years,” says Joshua Dunaief, professor of ophthalmology at the Scheie Eye Institute at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Great! But why not prevent it in the first place? So now we need dangerous drugs to treat so manh conditions that could be prevented and sometimes cured by simple and indexpensive dietary supplements.
If medical doctors were doing their jobs instead of the elephant-in-the-room rampant medical malpractice of ignoring nutritional deficiences, the rate of hundreds of illnesses would plumment (hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, mental illness)... including macular degeneration.
Magnesium Deficiency Differentially Affects the Retina and Visual Cortex of Intact Rats
...our results suggest that the influence of Mg-D on the intact visual system may be different from previous studies that used isolated retinas. This difference may depend not only on the hyperactivity of the NMDA receptor, but also on the behavior of the Ca2+ and Mg2+ ions in the intact eye.
BMJ: Diet patterns and the incidence of age-related macular degeneration in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study
Several studies suggest AMD patients should pay close attention to what they eat.
A study by researchers at the University at Buffalo published in the December issue of the British Journal of Ophthalmology found that participants who ate an “American diet” high in red and processed meat, fried food, refined grains and high-fat dairy were three times as likely to develop advanced AMD as participants who were deemed “prudent” eaters.
Diet appeared to play no role in the incidence of early AMD. The study was adjusted for age, race, education, calorie intake and smoking status.
That followed the publication in March 2019 of a 21-year study of nearly 5,000 participants in Europe that found those who adhered to a Mediterranean diet—as measured by nine components, including the consumption of vegetables, fruits, fish and legumes—had a 41% reduced risk of developing advanced AMD. The study was published in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology. “Of the nine components, the most important was eating fish twice a week,” says Emily Chew, director of the National Eye Institute Division of Epidemiology and Clinical Applications and chair of the National Institutes of Health’s Age-Related Eye Disease Study 2. “Particularly for people who have protective genes associated with AMD, the fish effect is almost like a two-thirds reduction in the disease.”
Since the completion of the first Age-Related Eye Disease Study in 2001, AMD patients have been encouraged to take a high-dose supplement of vitamins and minerals including vitamin C, vitamin E and lutein, a formulation that has been shown in clinical trials to reduce the progression to late AMD by 25%.
“Fish” as perhaps in Omega 3 fatty acids, below?
In general, the pattern of studies is that you find what you look for. Most researches are not at all creative, not even looking for things like magnesium deficiency, or using highly unreliable tests or making false assumptions about blood levels instead of tissue levels. So it’s important to look at many many studies.
Nutritional Modulation of Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly worldwide. It affects 30–50 million individuals and clinical hallmarks of AMD are observed in at least one third of persons over the age of 75 in industrialized countries (Gehrs et al., 2006). Costs associated with AMD are in excess of $340 billion US (American-Health-Assistance-Foundation, 2012). The majority of AMD patients in the United States are not eligible for clinical treatments (Biarnes et al., 2011; Klein et al., 2011). Preventive interventions through dietary modulation are attractive strategies because many studies suggest a benefit of micro and macronutrients with respect to AMD, as well as other age-related debilities, and with few, if any, adverse effects...
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Photoreceptors are exposed to an extensive amount of oxidative stress in the form of light and oxygen... The chemical nature of nutrients should help predict which nutrients are crucial for the retina. Being a highly lipophilic tissue that is subject to environmental and age-related oxidative stress, one might anticipate that maintaining adequate levels of lipophilic antioxidants (polyunsaturated fatty acids, carotenoids, vitamin E) would bring salutary effects. To some extent this is borne out in the results discussed below. However the situation is far more complex, with hydrophilic compounds such as sugars also apparently playing significant roles in retinal homeostasis and damage.... The combination of inadequate nutrition with the inability to properly degrade and dispose of cellular debris may contribute to the formation of deposits in the RPE-Bruch’s membrane region.
As might be expected given roles for complement in inflammatory pathways, inflammation is thought to play an important role in AMD pathology...
...Recent appreciation for the nutritional properties of the entire diet, rather than just antioxidants has led to investigations of the roles of macronutrients in AMD pathology...Increased intake of omega-3 fatty acids, especially long-chain omega-3 fatty acids such as docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) found in fish, have been associated with amelioration of a number of chronic diseases... Stronger evidence for a beneficial role of omega-3 fatty acids in eye health is found in two cross-sectional studies....Data from several additional prospective cohorts support a beneficial role of omega-3 fatty acids in reducing risk for any grade of AMD... The effect of fish intake on risk for AMD has been examined because fish is one of the most common dietary sources of omega-3 fatty acids... consumption of at least 2 servings of fish per week was associated with decreased risk for neovascular AMD compared to 0 servings per week.
...In a double-blind, placebo controlled trial of dry AMD patients, it was shown that supplementation with vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, vitamin B6 and folate for 18 months maintained visual acuity, compared to placebo treatment, in which there was a decrease in visual acuity (p = 0.03). The antioxidant supplement group also reported greater vision stability in the areas of visual acuity and contrast sensitivity (p = 0.05) (Richer, 1996). Another double-blind, placebo controlled trial of dry AMD patients found that supplementation with antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids maintained visual acuity over 6 months, while the placebo group lost visual acuity...
Vitamin C is a powerful anti-inflammatory agent everywhere in the body, and magnesium deficiency may well be involved because it is involved in up to 800 enzymatic processes—and nutrients work in synergy in the body.
What about poisons such as statins, which hugely impact the body’s ability to repair and maintain tissues, by depressing life-giving cholesterol? Note the LACK OF ALL MENTION of statin poisons in the entire full article referenced above.
