Soon after birth, most infants develop near emmetropic refractive errors that are then maintained in botheyes throughout childhood and into early adult life. However, for reasons not currently understood, asignificant and possibly increasing proportion of the population develop abnormal refractive errors (currentlyabout 30% of young adults in the USA have significant refractive errors). Refractive errors are a significantpublic health concern because in addition to the high costs and the complications associated with traditionaloptical and surgical correction strategies, refractive errors can lead to permanent sensory disorders andocular abnormalities causing blindness.The long-term goal of our research program is to provide a better understanding of the etiology of humanrefractive errors.
The specific aims of our proposed research are to determine how visual experience affectsrefractive development and to characterize the operational properties of the vision-dependent mechanismsthat regulate eye growth. Since many of the required experiments can not be conducted in humans, but ourpurpose is to generate knowledge that can be applied to human development, these experiments will beconducted using rhesus monkeys. Controlled rearing strategies and optical and ultrasonographicmeasurement techniques will be used to determine: 1) the relative contributions of the central and peripheralretina to emmetropization and vision-dependent changes in eye growth. 2) the impact of peripheral refractiveerrors on emmetropization, and 3) the spatial integration characteristics of the vision-dependent mechanismsthat regulate eye growth. These experiments focus on fundamental issues concerning the role of visualexperience that have largely been ignored'in previous studies in humans.Overall the proposed studies are an important step in determining how and to what extent visual experiencecontributes to the genesis of common human refractive errors. The results of these studies will potentiallyprovide the foundation for new treatment and management strategies for human refractive errors.
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