New research led by the NYU Grossman School of Medicine explores how a natural compound may offer protection against glaucoma, a leading cause of blindness. In the study recently published in Neurotherapeutics, researchers found that citicoline plays an important role in glaucomatous degeneration.
Fluid pressure can build up in patients with glaucoma, wearing down cells in the eye and the nerves connecting them to the brain. However, past studies have shown the condition to continue to worsen even after eye pressure has been controlled. The connection between pressure buildup and impaired vision remains poorly understood.
The study showed that animals ingesting citicoline led to the restoration of optic nerve signals between the brain and eye to near-normal levels. Citicoline is naturally produced in the brain and a major source of choline, a building block in the membranes that line nerve cells and enhance nerve cell communication. It is also a widely available dietary supplement, sold worldwide.
While the study results confirmed past findings that elevated eye pressure contributes to nerve damage in glaucoma, it also showed that citicoline reduced vision loss without reducing fluid pressure in the eye.
“Our study suggests that citicoline protects against glaucoma through a mechanism different from that of standard treatments that reduce fluid pressure,” says senior study author Kevin C. Chan, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology at NYU Langone. “Since glaucoma interrupts the connection between the brain and eye, we hope to strengthen it with new types of therapies.”
The findings are helping scientists better understand how glaucoma forms and progresses and add to past evidence that citicoline may counter the disease, says Dr. Chan, who is also the director of the Neuroimaging and Visual Science Laboratory at NYU Langone. Previous studies have shown that humans and rodents with glaucoma have lower than normal levels of choline in the brain. Until now, Dr. Chan says, there’s been little concrete evidence of the effectiveness of choline supplements as a therapy for glaucoma or why choline occurs in lower levels in people with glaucoma.
The investigators caution that more research is needed before turning to citicoline supplements to treat glaucoma in humans, as commercial drugs have yet to be proven fully effective in clinical trials. Moving forward, the researchers plan to investigate the origin of choline decline in people with glaucoma as well as how citicoline works to repair the damage.
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Source: NYU Langone Health