Is sight possible for kids once thought permanently blind?
Pawan Sinha was visiting a clinic in India four years ago when he met a boy blinded since birth by cataracts. Sinha, an associate professor of visual neuroscience at MIT, was surprised to see the child, who was about 7, suffering from such a treatable problem. He soon came to learn the child wasn't rare -- not in the least.
There are as many as 1.2 million children in India who are blind, often due to a correctable problem like cataracts. But lacking medical care, these children, most of them living in poor, rural areas, often remain blind.
And by age 8, they are considered hopeless cases. The conventional notion, said Sinha, is that a child blind for years likely has lost the capacity to see, even if doctors remove the cataracts.
"The idea is that if the brain is deprived of sensory information, visual information, for a certain period after birth, it loses the period of learning," said Sinha, a native of India. "So if later in life, the vision is restored, the brain won't be able to make use of it."
Now Sinha believes his research should lead doctors to rethink this notion. In 2003, he launched Project Prakash, an organization dedicated to restoring vision to Indian children while also studying how they do. Early results from Project Prakash -- named after the Sanskrit word for "light" -- suggest they do better than some might think.
In a case study published in December in the journal Psychological Science, Sinha and MIT graduate students Yuri Ostrovsky and Aaron Andalman reported that a 34-year-old woman, believed to have been blind from birth until she had cataracts removed at age 12, has learned to see.
Sinha met the woman by chance in 2003 while talking with her 6-year-old daughter, who like her mother, suffered from congenital cataracts. Upon studying her, Sinha and his team learned that while her eyesight was not good -- she had never been able to see from her right eye and had 20/200 vision in her left -- she could, in fact, see.
It's just one case, cautions Sinha, whose project has helped roughly 200 children. But he believes further research will show that some people are able to see even after years in the dark.
Patrick Cavanagh , a Harvard University psychology professor who studies visual perception , said Sinha's is interesting research that could not be done in the United States or other western countries, where congenital cataracts are quickly removed.
"He's getting a lot more accurate information about at what age restored vision will be of some benefit," said Cavanagh. " And I think he's been quite surprised that there are some improvements."
It's meaningful work, said Sinha, rewarding, and not just because of the science.
"All scientists work with the hope that at some point in the future their work will be relevant to the human condition," he said.
The good news for Sinha is, he doesn't have to wait to see the relevance. "Right away," he said, "we get to see how big a change the surgery brings in children's lives."
