Blind charity advocates national registry of eye disease cases

Opportunities to benefit from major breakthroughs on sight-loss will be lost without a national registry of patients with eye disease, Fighting Blindness has warned.

The leading patient-led charity yesterday called for the establishment of a national register, during a conference in Dublin which featured some of the world’s leading sight experts.

Sight-loss affects around 224,000 people in Ireland, a figure which is expected to increase to 272,000 by 2020.

Fighting Blindness started in 1983 when a group of families affected by blindness came together for support. The charity is now a global leader in the search for cures and treatments for blindness and has invested more than €15m across more than 70 research projects.

Fighting Blindness chief executive Avril Daly said the charity had a registry of people with rare inherited eye conditions — Target 5,000 — which could be used as a model for a national register to capture more common eye diseases.

Irish sprint runner and the fastest Paralympian on the planet, Jason Smyth, who attended the conference, lives with Stargardt disease and has 10% vision. Mr Smyth said the Government had committed to the objectives of the World Health Organisation’s Vision 2020 that aims to eliminate avoidable blindness by 2020. “So let’s play our collective part in making that vision a reality,” he said.

Consultant ophthalmic surgeon and Fighting Blindness board member David Keegan said gene therapy was a “game changer”.

“Gene therapy for the eye, where the defective disease-causing gene is replaced, is the game changer,” he said.