Blindness may be genetic by nature

Your kind of immunity may lead you to blindness. According to a new research to be published in the Science journal, scientists had been able to find out a genetic component that may lead to loss of sight.

In search of what is commonly known as blindness due to age, scientists have come up with a gene that may cause macular degeneration in elderly people. This is a variety of gene that encodes a protein called complement factor H (CFH). as people grow old, there happens very small damages to the eye tissue. Often there forms a combination of fats, proteins etc called drusen that affects the eye tissue s well. The particular variant of gene CFH causes up to seven times damage to eye tissue in elderly when compared to other forms of the gene. This happens, as this particular form of genes does not inhibit inflammations in the eye, causing loss of vision.

Three studies, conducted at different places, have come up with the same gene causing geriatric macular degeneration. One study even suggests that the gene may be responsible for almost half of the cases of blindness that happens to the elderly population.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1110189