Stargardt Disease

Stargardt disease is an inherited disease that leads to blindness. This disease occurs around 1 in every 10,000 children and is an autosomal recessive disease, therefore only being able to trace which parent has it, once the child has been confirmed whether or not to have this disease. It is caused by mascular degeneration, which eventually leads to blindness. Mascular degeneration is where the mascular part of the retina, where there are the most light-receptors, rods and cones (that are used for detecting light and fine focusing of images used in activities such as reading), begin to lose their structure and the rods and cones become less functional, causing the vision of people to degrade from 20/20 to 20/200 or worse. For some cases, there is also a chance of colour blindness, difficulty adapting the eyes to dim environments, blurry sight while having clear peripheral vision and wavy vision. Scientists have confirmed that this is caused by a genetic mutation in the ABCA4 gene, which causes this tissue to begin degrading. It can also be related to
The research had begun on April 28th of 2011 when it had received clearance from United States Food and Drug Administration and is currently ongoing. They have taken patients over 18 years old with diagnosed advanced Stargardt’s disease and with visual acuity lower than 20/400 for the worse vision research and 20/100 for higher vision research. They currently have 16 research subjects, undergoing the transplantation of the stem cells into the mascular tissue. They have split the 16 subjects into 5 groups; four groups have low vision (vision worse than 20/400) and have transplanted a range of 50,000 stem cells to 200,000 stem cells with increasing 50,000 intervals between each group. There is currently one group with better vision and 100,000 of the same stem cells have been transplanted into the