For the first time in the U.S., a blind woman’s sight was restored by fitting a plastic lens into a tooth from her mouth, and implanting the combination into her eye. The patient, a 60-year-old who had been blind for nine years, now has 20/70 vision that might further improve as she recovers from the surgery, according to the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, part of the University of Miami’s medical school, where the surgeries were conducted.
The procedure was developed in Italy in 1963 and has been used successfully in Europe and Japan, according to the Miami Herald. It’s a last-ditch procedure for people with problems with their cornea — where the lens would normally sit — because of trauma, corneal disease or scarring, but whose optic nerve and structures beneath the cornea are still healthy.
The patient’s eyetooth (as a canine tooth from the upper jaw is called)
was selected because it had a decent amount of jawbone and ligament attached, which are essential for the tooth to heal into the eye after implantation, notes the Herald.
“If there isn’t any infection, I’m optimistic we can preserve at least 20/70 vision for the next 10 years,” Victor Perez, a cornea specialist at Bascom, told the Miami Herald.