Love dairy products? Then feast your eyes on this.

Yoghurts, cereals, drinks or other dairy products that help to protect eyesight could be on supermarket shelves as early as next year. The foodstuffs will contain a mixture of patented bilberry and pine bark extracts found to lower high intraocular pressure (IOP), which is the main variable risk factor for glaucoma, the world's second leading cause of blindness.

In a study by researchers at the University of Chieti-Pescara in Italy, patients with elevated IOP who ate Mirtogenol, the combination of pine extract Pycnogenol and bilberry extract Mirtoselect, showed a 13% reduction in IOP, compared with a 0.4% reduction among the control group (Molecular Vision 2008, 14, 1288).

The discovery is the first time that dietary intervention has been shown to help control IOP, said Victor Ferrari, ceo of Horphag Research, the firm that makes Pycnogenol. 'Now there's finally a nutritional approach for decreasing the risk for developing glaucoma by normalising the intraocular pressure.'

The conventional treatment for high IOP is eye drops--typically beta blockers or prostaglandin analogues--which often have serious side effects that mean a number of individuals can't tolerate them.

Mirtogenol, which should be available as a food supplement in health food stores and pharmacies by the end of the year, is claimed to elicit only minor side effects such as stomach upsets in less than 2% of patients. Both Pycnogenol and Mirtoselect, made by plant chemicals firm Indena, are already used separately in a number of foodstuffs, particularly in Japan.

However, while 'this study regarding Mirtogenol is a good beginning, at some point the researchers need to widen [this] to include people with glaucoma, as only 5% of people with ocular hypertension actually develop glaucoma,' commented Jennifer Rulon, information and research specialist at the US Glaucoma Research Foundation.

High IOP affects 2% of people in the US aged between 40 and 50 and 8% of those over 70, according to the US Glaucoma Research Foundation.

Mirtogenol's effectiveness is explained by its activity reducing the over-supply of arterial fluid to the eye.

An eyeful: drug dispensing contact lenses

US researchers have developed contact lenses containing nanosilver particles that can continuously map the pressure inside the eye and administer medication (Advanced Functional Materials doi: 10.1002/adhn.200701437). The lenses, made from polydimethylsiloxane, are patterned with an eight by eight grid of nanosilver pressure points, capable of sensing tiny pressure changes by a piezoelectric mechanism and relaying them to a computer. Eye pressure, the leading cause of glaucoma, varies widely, so linking this to medicines that lower pressure in the eye could be a more effective way of delivering the treatment.

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