Tooth used to restore sight
A 60-year-old United States grandmother, blind for nearly a decade, has recovered her sight after surgeons implanted a tooth in her eye as a base to hold a tiny plastic lens, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald.
The woman’s doctor said that Sharron “Kay” Thornton, from the southern state of Mississippi, lost her sight in 2000 when she came down with a case of Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a rare disease that scarred her cornea, according to the University of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.
For patients whose bodies reject a transplanted or artificial cornea, this procedure “implants the patient’s tooth in the eye to anchor a prosthetic lens and restore vision,” said Thornton’s surgeon Victor Perez.
In the procedure which was pioneered in Italy but was a first in the United States, the medical team extracted Thornton’s canine or “eyetooth” and surrounding bone, shaved and sculpted it, and drilled a hole into it to insert an optical cylinder lens.
