Treatment approach to human Usher syndrome: Small molecules ignore stop signals
Friday, July 1, 2011 - 06:20
in Health & Medicine
Usher syndrome is the most common form of combined congenital deaf-blindness in humans and affects 1 in 6,000 of the population. It is a recessive inherited disease that is both clinically and genetically heterogeneous. In the most severe cases, patients are born deaf and begin to suffer from a degeneration of the retina in puberty, ultimately resulting in complete blindness. These patients experience major problems in their day-to-day life. While hearing loss can be compensated for with hearing aids and cochlea implants, it has not proven possible to develop a treatment for the associated sight loss to date. Researchers at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) in Germany have now developed a new treatment approach to this disease.