Doctors Say Injecting Gold Into Eyeballs Could Restore Lost Vision
Gold, laser goggles, and a camera: it's an unlikely combination that could one day be used to restore vision in people with retinal damage, according to researchers.
In a new study published in the journal ACS Nano, the team found that injecting gold nanoparticles into the eyes of mice with retinal disorders helped stimulate the rodents' visual systems and bring back some vision.
When targeted with infrared lasers, the microscopic gold pieces reproduce electrical signals similar to those emitted by cells in the retina that are essential to eyesight but are damaged by conditions like macular degeneration, which affects some 20 million Americans.
"This is a new type of retinal prosthesis that has the potential to restore vision lost to retinal degeneration without requiring any kind of complicated surgery or genetic modification," lead author Jiarui Nie, a researcher at Brown University and the National Institutes of Health, said in a statement about the work. "We believe this technique could potentially transform treatment paradigms for retinal degenerative conditions."
The most common retinal disorder, age-related macular degeneration, involves damage to cells in the retina called photoreceptors, causing blurry vision, blind spots, and in advanced stages, total loss of central vision. These photoreceptors come in the form of "cone" cells responsible for our perception of color, and "rod" cells that handle low light conditions. When light falls on them, the cones and rods zap little electrical pulses that are sent to bipolar and ganglion cells, which process the signals before they're beamed to the brain. If the photoreceptors are damaged, however, then the entire visual chain is cut off.
But gold nanoparticles — specifically, plasmonic gold nanorods — could effectively replace them. In the mice experiments, the researchers found that focusing infrared light onto the metal particles generated heat that stimulated the bipolar and ganglion cells, just like the photoreceptors would. This resulted in increased activity in the visual cortices of the mices' brains, indicating that the visual signals were in fact being received and that their vision was partially restored. And so far, the team hasn't observed any side effects from the approach.
"We showed that the nanoparticles can stay in the retina for months with no major toxicity," Nie said.
Applied to humans, a pair of goggles would beam infrared lasers encoding image data gathered from an onboard camera into the gold nanoparticles, and eureka — you have visual signals being sent to the brain. A similar approach was proposed a few years ago, the team notes, but crucially, this one doesn't require surgery, just a relatively simple injection (and a very advanced piece of headgear).
Nie believes the approach has other advantages, too, like allowing for a far higher-resolution image with a complete field of vision. Promising as it is, though, there's still significant research to be done before it can be tried in a clinical setting on humans, Nie said.
More on eyes: Scientists Hack Human Eye to See a Whole New Color, Called "Olo"
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San Francisco Chronicle
2 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
He took over a trans health nonprofit in California. Trump and Newsom made his job harder
SACRAMENTO — There is a room inside the Gender Health Center where the dead kick it with the living. It's in the back, on the two-story building's first floor, in a high-ceilinged common area that holds harm-reduction offices, racks of donated clothes, a curtained fitting area and cubbies stocked with free makeup, bra inserts, tucking underwear and skin-color swatches. Against a wall facing some well-worn couches is the altar, where about 30 people who have died, including the center's founder, are memorialized in pictures, words, paper flowers, flags and unlit candles. 'It's continuing to include our family who has transitioned (into death) in our celebrations, in our joy-centered work,' executive director Malakai Coté explained as his staff chatted and chuckled around a plastic table several yards away. 'To me, it's a celebration space. It's a lament, but it's also a celebration.' Not many things are just one thing to Coté, the 43-year-old therapist who somewhat reluctantly accepted the top job at the gender-affirming health provider in March 2024, eight months before Donald Trump reclaimed the White House with a campaign that vilified transgender people and immigrants. Less than five months into his second term as president, Trump has issued directives to strip transgender Americans of their health care, revoke housing and employment protections, ban them from military service and women's sports, and erase them from federal documents while penalizing the states that don't go along. Coté and his organization, which is emerging from a period of internal turmoil, are also contending with the prospect of debilitating state funding cuts as they swim against a national political backlash marshaled by a president who maintains that trans people simply do not exist. And yet. On a warm weekday afternoon at the beginning of Pride Month, the vibe inside the Gender Health Center was relaxed and happy, Coté's mood inviting and confident. He greeted a mother and adolescent child in the small lobby colorfully cluttered with wall art, queer media, encouraging sticky notes and a binder full of letters from past clients to new ones, letters that Coté still chokes up reading aloud. He showed off the cozy therapy wing, a lounge-y electrology studio, rooms and nooks where clients get blood panels done, pick up hormone kits and meet with a bubbly personal stylist, all for little to no money. He described an almost secret power — Coté called it 'magic' — within marginalized groups to create community in harsh conditions. Borrowing his mental health director's analogy, he compared it with composting, taking something discarded and — through the right amount of heat and movement — turning it into something that can grow new life. 'There's something that queer and trans people have figured out because we've had to. Because no one else was there,' he said. Thinking of the psychologically bruising politics and worsening national attitude, he added, 'There's also a responsibility to share that.' Journeys Coté came to the Gender Health Center around 2012, as a client. He was finishing up his master's degree in family therapy through the University of Oregon and eager to begin his medical transition. He paid out of pocket for several one-and-done consultations with primary care physicians but, not wanting to be someone's first trans patient, kept looking. One of the doctors referred him to the center, where a graduate student helped him get his paperwork to start hormone therapy. Facing a monthslong wait in Sacramento, Coté was able to fast-track the process by working with a nurse practitioner at the established Lyon Martin Community Health Services in San Francisco. But Sacramento was his home. And the scrappy, low-budget Gender Health Center had promise. Psychology student Danelle Saldana started the center in 2008 with $650 that she spent on incorporation fees, a telephone line and a post office box — alongside four volunteers who included her mother — tax records show. Saldana was moved and inspired by the people she met through her internship at the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, said her mother, retired social worker Essie Saldana. 'She just worked tirelessly to put the foundation together,' Essie Saldana said. Danelle Saldana died in her sleep in January 2009. She was 30. The Gender Health Center opened the next year. It has never been a flush operation. Its 2023 revenue intake of $703,000 marked the lowest since 2015, a period that overlapped with the center churning through six executive directors in three years, none of whom earned more than $69,500 annually and most of whom made considerably less. 'It had its ups and downs,' said Essie Saldana, who sits on the board. 'We all come with our own brokenness and our own issues, and sometimes it doesn't always work out that you can keep those things outside of your workplace. So we did. We had some significant turnovers.' In 2022, two co-directors resigned amid accusations of financial mismanagement, which prompted a strike and crowdfunding campaign for five fired staffers. They were followed by an interim director and several months where the board ran the organization. Coté, who was in private practice and consulting the center on its mental health programming, heard rumblings that funders were getting nervous about the nonprofit's direction. He had turned down a leadership position before. But he also kept hearing from people in his everyday life how important the Gender Health Center had been to their journeys. It was important to his. And he saw it moving in a positive direction. 'So then I got asked again,' he recalled. 'I said, 'OK.'' Ebony Harper, who started her advocacy career at the Gender Health Center in 2016 and now co-chairs Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis' Transgender Advisory Council, praised Coté as 'one of the most grounded and visionary leaders I've worked alongside.' 'He's stepping into this role during a time of intense political pressure, statewide budget cuts, and escalating attacks on trans communities,' Harper said in a text message. 'And he's doing it with clarity, tenderness, and this powerful sense of responsibility to both healing and justice.' Coté said the Trump effect has manifested most noticeably in a dour pall. Parents are worried about their children's access to treatment and rushing the waitlist. Employees and clients are concerned the president's dehumanizing rhetoric will encourage anti-trans violence in the same way hate crimes soared against the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities after Trump scapegoated China for COVID-19. The national LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit GLAAD said it tracked more than 930 anti-LGBTQ incidents in the country over a 12-month period ending on May 1, a 14% increase from the previous year and with more than half of the incidents perpetrated against trans people. 'Act of erasure' A different threat manifested from California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who divided his own party when he criticized trans athletes on his podcast with conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Contending with a $12 billion state budget shortfall partly owing to Trump's tariff decisions, Newsom eliminated $31 million in LGBTQ funding in a budget proposal known as the May revision. The money accounts for three-tenths of a percent of the state's projected deficit, and a lot more to the 68 community organizations that were expecting it. 'These aren't just cuts — they're an act of erasure,' Bamby Salcedo, president and CEO of the TransLatin@ Coalition in Los Angeles, said in a statement responding to Newsom's budget. 'The state is pulling funding from programs that were already promised, already contracted, and already making an impact in our communities.' Coté said the Gender Health Center stands to lose $500,000 — almost half of its funding — imperiling a core mental health program serving nearly 200 clients with 80 more wait-listed. Coté joined a coalition of LGBTQ, immigrant and reproductive health advocates lobbying against the cuts. The Legislature approved a $325 billion budget Friday that restored the threatened programs and rejected other Newsom cuts, but continued a freeze on new Medi-Cal enrollments for undocumented adults. State lawmakers and Newsom have until July 1 to ink a final budget deal. If the Bay Area and Southern California have more established support infrastructures for trans, nonbinary and gender-expansive residents, Sacramento's Gender Health Center occupies more rarefied air. According to the member-based coalition CenterLink, there are 60 LGBTQ community centers in California and 375 in the U.S., an unofficial tally that doesn't include the Gender Health Center. Mind the Gap, a consortium of gender care providers associated with the UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center, shows nine gender-affirmative organizations in the Bay Area. By all appearances, the Gender Health Center seems to be one of the few trans-led nonprofits offering its blend of free health and cultural services north of the Bay Area. In January, it opened an electrology studio to instant and overflowing demand. Arely Aguayo, owner of eleQTrospot, said they stumbled onto the untapped market potential while studying at the Monterey Bay Institute of Electrology, where their instructor and classmates dismissed their idea for a gender-affirming studio that bills insurance providers. Aguayo, a former health care advocate, understood the hesitancy. Their spouse and business partner spends hours each day calling and emailing insurance providers and, when that doesn't work, bringing in legal aid workers. 'She's freaking awesome,' Aguayo said. 'To this day, we still have people (asking), when are you gonna be open? … I just hope it opens doors for other electrologists to start accepting health insurance.' Coté is working on that piece now, through budding partnerships to train electrolysis providers in Butte County and mental health providers in Yuba County. He said he was also in the process of diversifying the center's funding to be less dependent on the state, but Newsom's cuts moved up the timeline by more than a year. Coté said the Gender Health Center was one of roughly four organizations like it to receive money through the California Reducing Disparities Project, which Newsom proposed cutting. Essie Saldana says she'll give what she can. 'I don't have any grandkids. She was my only daughter. So everything I had would've been hers,' she said, her voice breaking. 'So it goes to the Gender Health Center.' The retired social worker spent nearly 50 years working with physically and developmentally disabled children. She sometimes took her daughter to work when Danelle was a toddler, and said she had to be told not to help the other kids so much, that they needed to learn to fall and get up on their own. 'But that was my baby girl,' she said. Coté sees himself as an inheritor in more ways than one. He took the job out of a sense of duty and will remain in it as long as he feels he's continuing the work of his predecessors and benefiting those around him. His hope is that he's cultivating his own replacement. He thinks of the dead and gone, what they endured, yes, but also what they enjoyed and imparted. His great-great-grandfather was enslaved. His grandfather was a taxi driver who used his hack and wage to bring food to his church, that generation's version of a social safety net. Coté has a doctorate and a platform. 'This is how I think about gender anyway,' he said. 'It's more about seeing possibilities. Oh, this is a possibility that's within me, and now I'm embodying it. And with any possibility, there's hope.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
There's a new blood test for Alzheimer's. Here's everything you need to know.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently cleared a blood test that detects signs of Alzheimer's disease in the brain, according to multiple studies. This is the first-ever blood test available for this common form of dementia. Here's how the new blood test works and why it could be useful to patients. Alzheimer's disease is on the rise, in part because the age group most prone to dementia is growing larger. In the U.S., an estimated 7.2 million Americans ages 65 and older are living with Alzheimer's dementia in 2025. The percentage of affected people increases with age: About 5% of people ages 65 to 74 have Alzheimer's, compared with more than 33% of people ages 85 and older. At the point when a doctor has verified that a patient has cognitive decline, the blood test can be used in place of standard tests to see if they likely have Alzheimer's. Previously, gold-standard methods of diagnosing Alzheimer's have been more invasive and expensive, involving positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which use radioactive substances; and lumbar punctures, (also called spinal taps) during which a clinician uses a needle to sample spinal fluid from the low back. Clinicians also sometimes use MRIs or CT scans to rule out other causes of cognitive decline. The new test measures the ratio of two proteins in human blood, and this ratio correlates with the presence or absence of amyloid plaques, a primary sign of Alzheimer's found in the brain. For people experiencing memory lapses that might be due to Alzheimer's, the first step is to see their primary care physician (PCP), who should do a cognitive test. If there are signs of cognitive impairment, the patient would then be referred to a neurologist for an in-depth evaluation. Both dementia specialists and PCPs will be able to order this blood test to help with diagnosis, said Dr. Gregg Day, a neurologist with the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida; Day led a study of the blood test published in June in the Journal of the Alzheimer's Association. A study published in 2024 in JAMA found that whether the test was ordered by a PCP or specialist, it was equally accurate at confirming suspected Alzheimer's diagnoses. PCPs could use the test results to decide whether to refer patients to a specialist, who could prescribe treatments such as lecanemab or donanemab, Day said. Or the PCP could personally prescribe a medicine like donepezil, which can help improve mental function in Alzheimer's. With FDA clearance, Medicare and private health insurance providers alike are expected to cover the new blood test, Day said. The test — called the "Lumipulse G pTau217/ß-Amyloid 1-42 Plasma Ratio" — is intended for people ages 55 and older who show signs and symptoms of cognitive decline that have been confirmed by a clinician. The test is designed for the early detection of amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease. (Amyloid plaques are unusual clumps found between brain cells and made up of a type of protein called beta-amyloid.) Related: Man nearly guaranteed to get early Alzheimer's is still disease-free in his 70s — how? Early detection is important, said Dr. Sayad Ausim Azizi, clinical chief of behavioral neurology and memory disorders at the Yale School of Medicine. That's because the Alzheimer's brain is like a rusty engine — the plaque is like rust settling onto the engine, interfering with the wheels' ability to turn, Azizi told Live Science. There are FDA-approved treatments that act like oil, helping the wheels to turn, but the medication does not remove the rust itself, he said. Available therapies can slow down the degradation of the brain by about 30% to 40%, studies show, so the patient can retain function for longer. "If you're driving now and living independently and you don't take the medicine, it's likely in five years you won't be able to do all these things," Azizi said, providing a hypothetical example. "If you take the medicine, the five years are extended to eight." If adopted as intended, the new blood test could help more people access these treatments sooner. The test is not recommended for the purposes of screening the general population. It is intended only for people who have been found by a doctor to exhibit signs of Alzheimer's disease, Day and Azizi emphasized. Some amount of amyloid is present in the brain during healthy aging, so its presence doesn't guarantee someone will later have Alzheimer's. If the test detects signs of amyloid plaques 20 years before any cognitive symptoms surface, Azizi explained, it would not make sense to treat the patient at that time. "The treatments are not 100% benign," he added. To receive lecanemab, for example, patients must be able to receive an infusion every two weeks at first and every four weeks later on; donanemab is given every four weeks. Both medications can come with infusion-related reactions, such as headache, nausea and vomiting. Rarely, the treatment donanemab can cause life-threatening allergic reactions, and both lecanemab and donanemab have been tied to rare cases of brain swelling or bleeding in the brain. These latter side effects are related to "amyloid-related imaging abnormalities," which are structural abnormalities that appear on brain scans. The new test can give false positives, meaning a person can potentially test positive when they don't actually have Alzheimer's. That's because the signs of amyloid that the tests look for can be tied to other conditions. For instance, amyloid buildup in the brain could be a sign the kidneys are not functioning optimally, Day said, so he recommends also doing a blood test for kidney function when ordering the Alzheimer's blood test. The Mayo Clinic study included about 510 people, 246 of whom showed cognitive decline; the blood test confirmed 95% of those with cognitive symptoms had Alzheimer's. About 5.3% of cases showed a false negative on the blood test, while 17.6% of cases gave a false positive, Day said. Most of the false-positive patients still had Alzheimer's-like changes in their brains, but their symptoms were ultimately attributed to other diseases, such as Lewy body dementia, Day said. The Mayo study found that the blood test helped doctors distinguish Alzheimer's from these other forms of dementia. As is true of many clinical trials, evaluations of the test have primarily included populations that are healthier than average, Day said. These individuals are not only healthier at baseline, but are more likely to have health insurance and be white and non-Hispanic. So when the blood test is used in a broader population, there may be people with sleep apnea or kidney disease who test positive despite not having Alzheimer's, Day said. Some people with these health problems may also experience memory issues or cognitive impairment that's not caused by Alzheimer's disease. If the blood test points to amyloid buildup, doctors could order additional tests and ask patients about their sleep to help rule out these other possibilities. RELATED STORIES —Could vaccines prevent and treat Alzheimer's disease? —Study unravels whole new layer of Alzheimer's disease —Alzheimer's comes in at least 5 distinct forms, study reveals The test will give researchers a more precise idea of how a patient's clinical symptoms relate to the findings on their blood test, Azizi said. "It's a great way of using a biomarker [measurable sign of disease] in the blood to make an earlier diagnosis to give a drug" to slow disease progression, he said. Azizi added that this blood test could help track whether a treatment for Alzheimer's disease is working, which would be useful both for patients receiving approved medicines and those in trials of new drugs. Looking forward, researchers will also be able to evaluate how well blood-based testing works in more diverse populations, Day noted. This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
Business Insider
3 hours ago
- Business Insider
Eat your beans — 1 cup a day cuts inflammation and bad cholesterol, scientists say
A daily dose of beans can cut cholesterol, lower inflammation, and may help fend off chronic illnesses like heart disease, new research suggests. A group of researchers from the Illinois Institute of Technology looked at 72 adults with prediabetes for three months, long enough to see changes in health metrics like blood sugar control. The participants were divided into three groups. One group was instructed to add a cup of black beans per day to their normal routine. Another group added a daily cup of chick peas. The third, the control group, ate white rice instead of beans. By the end of the 12-week study, participants who ate chickpeas reduced their cholesterol levels around 10%, from high — an average of 200.4 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL) — to normal — 185.8 mg/dL. Participants who ate black beans saw a significant drop in their inflammation levels. The study, presented at the American Society for Nutrition's annual conference June 3, focused on people with prediabetes — a condition that affects more than a third of Americans. Many don't get diagnosed until it becomes advanced and is harder to manage. Diet strategies like adding beans could be a way to intervene before people develop diabetes or other health issues, Indika Edirisinghe, principal investigator in the study and professor Illinois Institute of Technology, told Business Insider. "The small change is helpful. Just 10% is like saving your life, saving your money. This is not rocket science." Beans are a superfood for metabolism and longevity Beans are rich in fiber, a type of carbohydrate that helps support healthy digestion and metabolism. It also feeds beneficial bacteria in our gut known as the microbiome, which are linked to everything from good mental health to healthy aging. Beans also offer a range of polyphenols, plant-based compounds that help reduce inflammation and oxidative stress which contribute to disease. While a wealth of previous research has linked eating beans to longevity and heart health, many past studies weren't rigorous enough to show beans cause the benefits. This study used direct measurements of change like blood tests. They also uniquely assessed the health effects of different types of beans separately, instead of looking at legumes more generally. Having one group eat chickpeas and another eat black beans allowed researchers to look for potential benefits of different nutrients, Morganne Smith, a doctoral candidate at Illinois Institute of Technology who presented the study at the conference, told Business Insider. 5 tasty ways to add beans to your diet Don't be intimidated about adding beans to your daily diet. There are lots of ways to get creative without much time, prep work, or expensive ingredients. Smith said she's already a bean enthusiast, but her family has been enjoying them even more often recently with simple bean recipes. "I try to look for easy ways. Nothing too fancy," she said. To get started: Mix up a bean salad with chopped onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and any leftover veggies you have on hand. Blend beans into a soup to create a thicker texture and add nutrients. Snack on hummus or other bean-based dips. Opt for chickpea pasta instead of wheat-based paste for more protein and fiber. Try beans for breakfast! Edirisinghe starts the day with chickpeas sauteed in coconut, olive oil, lemon juice, and a dash of salt and pepper. You can also experiment with different seasonings to create more variety in your bean regimen. Turmeric, for instance, can add earthiness and bright color, as well as a boost of anti-inflammatory benefits. Beans are also a healthy eating staple because they're both affordable and easy to find, said Smith. "On top of the health benefits, I'm excited about the idea that people will think 'That's really easy to just continue incorporating in my diet realistically,'" she said.
