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Impossible-sounding surgery cures blindness by implanting a patient's own tooth in their eye

"Tooth-in-eye" surgery sounds like something out of science fiction, but it permanently restores vision in 94% of patients.

Canva Photos

You have to see it to believe it.

About 12 million people in the United States live with significant visual impairment. About a million of those people live with blindness. Unfortunately, there is no known cure for blindness. Therapies exist to slow vision loss, and some vision loss can be improved with treatment, but complete vision loss has proved to be a very tough nut for scientists to crack, in part because there are so many different potential causes of blindness.

Medical researchers have and continue to look into lots of diverse options, including stem cell therapies, gene therapies, bionic eyes, and now...teeth. Yes, you read that right. Teeth.

A 33-year-old man recently became the first person in Canada to have their sight restored by a rare and outrageous-sounding procedure: Osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, or OOKP.

OOKP has been around since the 1960s and has been performed around the globe, but is still relatively rare overall. Invented by Professor Benedetto Strampelli, the procedure is better known by its easy-to-remember, and fairly gross, nickname: "Tooth-in-eye surgery." Why in God's name is it called that? Buckle up if you're squeamish. Here's how it works:

gif of man buckling seatbeltBuckle up; this is going to be wild. Giphy

First, a tooth is removed from the patient. A small rectangular section of the tooth is shaved off and a hole is drilled in the middle of it. Imagine cutting a small circle out of the middle of a sheet of paper.

Then, a small plastic lens is inserted into the hole, almost like a window covering or a makeshift camera lens. The section of tooth acts like a frame to hold the new lens.

OK, now for the really wild part: The rectangular shaving of tooth, complete with plastic lens, is then embedded into the patient's cheek in order to grow new tissue and blood vessels. It will stay there for around two months while the new tissue develops.

The tooth is then removed from the cheek and surgically embedded into the patient's eyeball, effectively replacing the damaged cornea. The new eye is pink and bloodshot in appearance, and a little bulbous, with only a small block hole as an iris. But, miraculously, it works!

The patient's own teeth are used to prevent the body rejecting foreign tissue or materials. Tooth-in-eye surgery only works for vision loss caused by corneal damage, or damage to the surface of the eyes. It won't heal or replace the optic nerve or retina, so it's not a miracle cure for all forms of blindness. It also comes with some risks, but when it works, it works. One study showed that 94% of successful cases still had good eyesight almost 30 years later, with some formerly blind patients seeing well enough to drive cars.

The Canadian man became blind at the age of 13 after a terrible autoimmune reaction to ibuprofen. After dozens of surgeries and therapies, OOKP was his last-ditch effort to permanently restore his sight. Other treatments had helped but his sight would fade away over time. For now, his story is a massive success that doctors are hoping will inspire others to give the controversial procedure a try.

The video below shows the procedure and its aftermath:


@garcidltth1

#popularscience #knowledge #fyp #tiktok

We have to keep funding bizarre, off-the-beaten-path scientific research.

This sounds like one of those wacky things you'd see in the news and say, "Why are we spending millions of dollars trying to see if we can grow new eyeballs from teeth?!" But without critical and creative research like this, we'd be no further in treating conditions like blindness. A version of OOKP was performed successfully in the United States at The University of Miami in 2009.

Amazing medical breakthroughs can come from the strangest places. Fascinating discoveries have been made by making people drink their own blood and monitoring the effects, studying the chemical makeup of goose poop, and looking for answers in tree bark, snake venom, and rat poison.

Cheers to Professor Benedetto Strampelli, and his weird but effective stroke of inspiration.

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Heroes

These glasses help colorblind people see colors. Watch this guy put them on.

Paul Collins is a designer. He's also colorblind.

Colorblindness affects about 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women with northern European ancestry, and there are a lot of different types and causes for it. Not everyone who's colorblind is too put out by it, although there are some real ways colorblind people have been overlooked.

But for Collins, as an artist, colorblindness presented some particularly tough challenges.

"As an artist, I want to be able to fully express that which is inside of me," says Collins. "I feel like I can only give some of myself."

Collins dealt with this struggle at work for a long time. Then, his wife told him about some weird glasses she'd seen.

They were from a company called EnChroma, and they reportedly helped colorblind people see colors. At first, Collins says he wasn't interested. "She was like, 'You should check this out,' and I'm like, 'No, that's OK. Thank you, but no thank you. I love you, but no thank you.'"

But after a while, he decided to give them a shot.

The glasses work by tweaking how our eyes see the color spectrum.

Color is a smooth rainbow from violet to red. So what the glasses basically do is use filtered lenses to hide certain in-between colors. For example, by filtering out the "almost-red/almost-green" colored light, the glasses trick the eyes and brain into seeing red and green as two distinct categories.

It's kind of like taking a picture and turning up the contrast. Except the picture is the entire world.

That said, the glasses don't work for all kinds of colorblindness or every person. There have been a lot of people who've had kind of a "meh" reaction.

But for Collins, the change was pretty spectacular.

"I put them on, and I was like, "Oh my God, these work," says Collins. "It's almost like an amusement park ride just walking. The undersides of leaves, the color of the red track, people's clothing."

Of course, these glasses won't cure colorblindness, and they won't work for everyone. But they're still a really amazing step toward helping folks see the colors of our world. "Technology is so cool," said Collins.

Watch Collin's story below:

Heroes

He thought he'd never be able to see again. Thanks to his tongue, he can.

Andy woke up with no sight and a tube down his throat.

On Sept. 28, 2011, an unknown person assaulted Andy. The attack knocked him unconscious, and when he woke up, he couldn't see anymore. The assault had damaged his optic nerve.

"I thought to myself, 'Hah. Whatever. You'll just open me up, reattach the wires and lights come back on again,'" recalls Andy. But that wasn't going to happen. "[The doctor] put his hand on my shoulder and said, 'I'm sorry, Andy.'"

Over time, Andy adjusted to losing his sight. But it wasn't easy.

More than 7 million American adults are blind or have a visual disability and it doesn't necessarily have to be a sad thing. But for Andy, losing his sight was difficult.

"The hardest thing for me being completely blind is not seeing my family every day," says Andy. "For me to learn to accept, 'You're never going to see again, Andy. You're never going to see your wife, your children, your dog.' Taken away in the blink of an eye. It's not fair."

But then the doctor said he might know something that could help.

There's a weird device out there called the BrainPort. It lets people see with their tongues. Yeah — their tongues. The device has three parts: a small camera, an iPhone-sized computer, and a weird half-spatula/half-lollipop-looking thing.

Using it is pretty simple: The camera and computer capture an image, then send it as a pattern of buzzes to the lollipop, which the person puts in their mouth (the buzzes apparently feel kind of like Pop Rocks candy.)

A buzzing lollipop sounds pretty weird, but it does seem to work.

Our brains are actually pretty good at figuring out how to use new information (it also helps that our tongues are incredibly sensitive, as anyone who's accidentally bitten theirs can tell you). It took a little while for Andy to get used to the buzzing sensation, but not that long.

"I felt this buzzing on my tongue, and I felt the impression. And then I saw my hand. For the first time in five years, I saw my hand," Andy explains. "Something that small is huge."

If certain studies are correct, Andy's brain could have processed the signals in his vision centers, as if the information was coming from his eyes themselves.

Seeing his hand must have been big. But not as big as seeing his family again.

"The first person was [my son] little Andy. He shook his hand back and forth and he said, 'Dad, you can see me?'" says Andy. You could see the emotion in his face. "He said, 'Hey, pop.'"

"It had been five years since I've seen my kids," Andy says. "It's incredible."

Watch Andy's story below:

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A 6-year-old girl is preparing to go blind by seeing as much of the world as she can.

Catrina Frost remembers looking at photos of her daughter, Cailee, as a baby and thinking one of her eyes looked off-center.

Cailee's older brother, Tanner, had been born a few years earlier with major vision problems, so at first, the mom of four wanted to believe she was just being overly cautious.

Later, a vision test revealed that Cailee did indeed have some problems with her eyes. She was severely nearsighted and suffering from amblyopia, where the function of one eye is reduced because the eye and the brain are not working together properly.

But Catrina's instincts told her there was something more going on too.

"I just had this mommy gut feeling," Catrina said. "And I literally remember being in theparking lot [of the optometrist] thinking, 'you know what, I just think there's more tothis.'"

Eventually Cailee was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called FEVR (familial exudative vitreoretinopathy).

It was a condition that would likely eventually cause her to go completely blind.

This is Cailee in a pink shirt that reads, 'Always be who you are.' All photos by Catrina Frost, unless otherwise noted.

It was during a road trip to see a FEVR specialist in California that Catrina had an idea: a "sightseeing" bucket list.

As they drove, they came across the Imperial Sand Dunes, miles of soft, beautiful sand sandwiched by smooth dessert on either side. And Cailee fell in love with them.

The sun setting behind the Imperial Sand Dunes in California. Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.

"We pulled over and she ran up and downand up and down these sand dunes for like an hour. And got filthydirty and made sand angels and had a blast. And it was really therethat I realized I had to make myself a list of places that she shouldgo and things that she should do. ... If I hadn't stopped and given her that experience, she would neverhave been able to pull from that memory, that soft sand, and what thatlooked like and felt like."

When the two got to California, the specialist told them Cailee would likely lose all her vision within the next four or five years.

So when it came to this "bucket list" idea, it was now or never.

With help from donations brought in via a GoFundMe campaign, Cailee has been able to see the flowing gowns of princesses at Disney World...

Cailee hugs Belle at Disney World.

... the sparkling water of swimming pools ...

Cailee floats in a pool.

... crashing blue waves ...

Cailee hugs her Minnie Mouse doll on the beach.

... her first beach sunset ...

Cailee soaks in the sunset.

... and that's really just the beginning.

You don't need a visual memory to be able to perceive and interact with the world. But for Catrina, Cailee, and her three brothers (who are also along for the ride), the memories they make on these adventures will bring the family a lot of joy over the coming years.

"We're still putting the listtogether," Catrina said. "I've asked Cailee what she wants to do. She really wants to try horseback riding [again]. She wants to go to a ballet,so "The Nutcracker" is something I'm thinking about taking her to. Ithink she'd really enjoy that."

Some day soon, Catrina will take the kids to see the giant California redwoods. Then, a fashion show. Then art class, rock-climbing class, cooking class.

And so many other things.

In the meantime, Catrina says they are preparing Cailee to go blind.

Cailee practices walking with a cane.

She has been practicing her cane skills and reading braille in school for years. So when the time comes, she'll be ready.

"She came out of her third laser surgery whenshe was just this little, itty-bitty thing and said 'Momma, girlsare tough.'" Catrina recalled. "And I said 'Yeah, baby, girls are tough.' And that has beenher motto."

Catrina urges other parents to make sure their kids get their eyes checked early and often, but also that blindness, and conditions that can cause it, are not necessarily something to fear.

"Whether she's sighted or not, I haveno doubt this girl has amazing, amazing things coming in her future," Catrina said. "I have no doubt."

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