Today was a “get your ‘stuff’ together” day. Every once in a while it gets so that if I don’t stop and take care of the business at hand, I will be having a screaming fit.
Like last evening for example! However, I have now gotten a haircut, gone grocery shopping and cleaned the living room, as well as having completed a few other tasks, like taking the recycling. Feeling a little more in control – I probably should not say that too loudly – and ready to tackle a page Lin suggested.
That page will be on – drum roll, please – eye poop! Okay, so that is not what they are really called. Most of the world call them drusen.
In a Harvard Health Publishing article that asks the questions: what are drusen and why do I have them, the author describes drusen as “deposits of extracellular waste”. You got it, eye poop.
In younger people, the sanitation department in eyes generally takes care of the eye poop. That ‘sanitation department’ is the retinal pigment epithelial cells aka RPEs. Yes, your RPEs are supposed to ingest eye poop. But you know what? Your RPEs are into recycling, too! They are discovering your eye is its own, little ecosystem. James Hurley at the University of Washington at Seattle and his team have discovered RPEs and the retinal cells are in this close relationship in which the wastes and byproducts of metabolism in one type of cell are the food another type of cell needs. Mess up in one part of the system and everything goes to Hades.
Why would the RPEs stop doing their recycling thing? No answers, just theories but one thing is for sure, age has something to do with it. Most people over 60 have at least a few piles of eye poop hanging around.
You know how it goes. Things don’t seem to work as well when we are older. Some messes pile up.
Eye poop becomes a problem when it starts wiggling in between the RPEs and the Bruch’s membrane. Bruch’s membrane is where the RPEs get the nutrients they need to feed the photoreceptors.
Think of it as a huge landslide standing between you and the grocery store. If you cannot get to the store, you go hungry and may die. If you die, those you are responsible for die too. Same with RPEs and photoreceptors.
Again, no one is exactly sure why some people get away with just a few, stray piles of eye poop and others have dozens. There is an underlying error or errors that have yet to be proven. The researchers are working on it.
The Harvard paper points out drusen aka eye poop do not cause AMD. They are just manifestations of the disease process.
Hope that was a help. Hope you understand things a little more thoroughly. Night!
Written March 18th, 2018