At first, Christine Jablonski didn't worry about the blurry vision in her right eye. She dismissed it as a flake of morning mascara and went about her daily business in Ellicott City. But within two hours, the eye went dark.
She rushed to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where doctors told her there was nothing they could do to restore her vision - she had suffered an "eye stroke" from a clot blocking a key blood vessel that supplies the retina.
But her daughter, a doctor, had heard about an experimental treatment pioneered by doctors at Hopkins' Wilmer Eye Institute. The hospital's Brain Attack Team, a group of physicians who specialize in strokes of the brain, was called in. They ran a catheter all the way from Jablonski's groin to her eyeball and injected a clot-busting agent.
"I could see my vision coming back. It was like a curtain of color," Jablonski said. Within two hours, her eyesight had returned to normal.
Her experience and reports of success with other volunteers in a seven-year Hopkins study raise hopes for up to 50,000 people who suffer eye strokes each year and would otherwise face irreversible loss of sight in one eye.
But Hopkins doctors caution that the experimental procedure carries its own serious risks, and success seems to depend on getting the patient into treatment as soon as possible. It didn't work at all on almost 25 percent of patients in the study, and other authorities say more trials are necessary before they can recommend the procedure.
Still, the Hopkins team was heartened by the results: Their volunteers were 13 times more likely than those undergoing conventional therapies to show significant improvement with standard eye charts. And they were almost five times as likely to achieve a final visual acuity of 20/100 or better on a 20/20 scale.
"We have a disorder that was basically irreversible, but with our technique, we see that a majority of patients experienced some level of improvement in their vision," said Dr. Eric Aldrich, a neurologist at the School of Medicine and lead author of a study published in the June issue of the journal Stroke. "No one has ever reported these types of results on such a large scale in North America."
An eye stoke, technically known as a central retinal artery occlusion, occurs when a clot forms in a small blood vessel within the eye. The interruption of blood flow destroys the retina, the light-sensitive nerve layer that captures images. The attack is sudden and painless, but it causes partial or complete vision loss in one eye. The other eye is usually unaffected.
