Your eyes can reveal your brain health secrets

Auckland, New Zealand, January 20: The French say, 'Les yeux sont le miroir de l'dme (The eyes are the mirror of the soul). But, now researchers has devised a new system, known as optical coherence tomographydefine (OCT), which allows light to peep into deep layers of the retina making it possible to not only locate but also monitor the growth of brain tumours and also track neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

The OCT can scan the retina in a non-invasive manner by reflecting light in the same manner just like an ultrasound, but here it bounces the light off the tissue instead of sound waves. One beam of light is fired at the retina and another at a reference mirror simultaneously, and then the distances and brightnesses of the two reflections are analyzed.

The new technique allows for a very large depth, as well as for the generation of highly-detailed 2D and 3D images of the way the optical nerve looks like. When applied to the optic nerve disc ( OND -- region of the retina where gangliondefine cells meet to form the optic nerve -- it can give information about both the shape and thickness of retinal nerve fibres, allowing even subtle changes to be tracked.

The researchers said that since late 1980's the link between the degeneration of the optic nerve and the neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer’s has been around but without the instruments capable of measuring the retinal changes precisely it is only recently that this information could be put to use.

Helen Danesh-Meyer, an eye surgeon and neuro-ophthalmologist at the University of Auckland Medical School in New Zealand, says that the main aim of using OCT is to determine if the people being surveyed shows signs of diseases such as MS ( multiple sclerosis), Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.

The health experts feel that with the help of new device they can detect the signs of the disease much earlier while earlier they had to wait for them to become obvious. The device works on the basic operating principle which means anything affecting cells in the brain affects cells in the optic nerve as well, as the two of them are directly connected.

The OCT machine is although expensive but once they are brought by the hospital, the scans themselves are quite cheap. Also, the results of the scans can be processed within no time and if hospital start using OCT technique in routine eye check ups, this could possibly save future multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer's sufferers from having to undergo expensive treatments, required in order to ameliorate the symptoms of their conditions.