The Corneal Transplant Service скачать в хорошем качестве

The Corneal Transplant Service

Please donate to: http://www.nerc-charity.org.uk/donate Transcription – Professor John Armitage “The UK Corneal Transplant Service” The Eye Bank here in Bristol was set up in the mid-1980s, and it arose because there were already two eye banks in the UK but they really only served the patients in those particular hospitals so, if a patient, for example in Bristol, needed a corneal transplant it had to be done as an emergency out of hours procedure, so the whole point about setting up this particular service was to make corneas available to any patients in the country when they needed it. So, operations could be planned and planned well in advance. When the eye bank was starting up we didn’t have any funding from the NHS at all, and the National Eye Research Centre provided a lot of money for the equipment we needed to set up the service and over the years since we’ve been running, since the mid-1980s, when we have had equipment needs, then National Eye Research Centre has stepped in and supported that. But the National Eye Research Centre has also funded important research that we carry out on the actual outcome of the cornea transplants so we are not just here to supply the corneas, we also need to know how well they are doing in patients. Corneal transplants can reject, just like organ transplants, but less is known about that rejection process or how to try and avoid it, and so the National Eye Research Centre has been funding a project, that we have been running for quite a few years now, where we are gathering data on well over a thousand patients and following those patients, each of them for five years, to monitor if they do reject and then, if they do reject, we can go back on the data we’ve got and we can understand more about which patients are more likely to reject and whether there are certain treatments we can provide that will reduce the risk of rejection. The numbers of transplants just here in Bristol are about 120 – 150 a year, but the Bristol Eye Bank, along with the Manchester Eye Bank, between us, we supply corneas for 90% of the cornea transplants in the UK, and that’s currently running about 3,500 a year. So at Bristol we’re probably supplying somewhere over 1,500 corneas a year for patients throughout the UK. The cornea is the clear part of the front of the eye. It lets light into the eye and focuses images on the back of the eye, on the retina, and that’s why we can see. Unfortunately, disease or injury can cause the cornea, which is normally absolutely transparent, it can cause it to become cloudy and of course that has a very severe impact on your ability to see and can cause blindness. The eye bank here, again because of the support of the National Eye Research Centre, has an international reputation and we present data from here at major international meetings, not just in the States but in Australia, Japan and many European countries as well. As with a lot of medical or transplant research the aim is to avoid having to do these transplants in the first place. So, without the backing, without the funding to carry out research, we’ll still be carrying on doing corneal transplants for year after year until we can understand the diseases of the cornea more. If we do have to do transplants, how do we actually give the best chance of survival for that graft? That project has been going on since 1999 and that’s where it is really difficult to get major long term funding from the big medical research funding bodies, and that’s where National Eye Research Centre has been absolutely essential to providing that long term funding and support, so we can carry on such long term studies. A lot of studies run for maybe two or three years, well, here we’re talking about fifteen or more years already on this one. Please donate to: http://www.nerc-charity.org.uk/donate