A Tooth for an Eye

It has been found that with progression of age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of deteriorating eyesight in people over 50 is hastened bydeposits of a mineral found in tooth enamel at the back of the eye.

Amelotin may turn out to be a therapeutic target for the blinding disease. These findings were published in the journal Translational Research. NEI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

“Using a simple cell culture model of retinal pigment epithelial cells, we were able to show that amelotin gets turned on by a certain kind of stress and causes formation of a particular kind of calcium deposit also seen in bones and teeth. When we looked in human donor eyes with dry AMD, we saw the same thing,” said Graeme Wistow PhD, chief of the NEI Section on Molecular Structure and Functional Genomics, and senior author of the study.

The deposits themselves are composed of mineralised calcium called hydroxyapatite which is also a key component of tooth enamel and bone. When these deposits occur under the retinal pigment epithelium, they can impair vision by blocking the access of oxygen as well as nutrients to the photosensitive cells of retina. This results in significant distortion of a person's vision. Small balls of hydroxyapatite filled with cholesterol, called spherules, were found only in people with dry AMD, and not in those with wet AMD or without AMD.

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“Prior to this study, nobody really knew how the hydroxyapatite was accumulating in the dry AMD drusen,” said Dinusha Rajapakse PhD, the first author of the study. “Finding this tooth-specific protein in the eye, this protein that’s linked to hydroxyapatite deposition – that was really unexpected.”