As happens7:03For the first time in Canada, surgeons are putting teeth in patients’ eyes to restore view
When Brent Chapman’s doctor first launched him to the idea of having one of his own surgically embedded teeth in his eye to restore his eyes, he says he felt “a bit apprehensive.”
But then he spoke with a woman in Australia who had submitted the same procedure to the same procedure.
“He had been completely blind for 20 years, and is now skiing in the snow,” said Chapman, 33, from North Vancouver. “I know it sounds a little crazy and science fiction.”
Chapman, who is blind in both eyes, is one of the three Canadians who undergo keratoprothesis of osteo -odonto (ookp), or as more is known, a tooth surgery in the eyes, in a BC hospital this week.
It implies eliminating a patient’s tooth, usually the canine, installing a plastic optical lens inside it and then implanting everything in the eye.
While it goes back several decades, surgery had never been performed in Canada. And if everything goes well, one of the doctors behind the initiative expects to make it available in the long term.
How does it work?
Why a tooth? Because the teeth have dentin, which is the most difficult substance that the body produces, which makes it the ideal housing to close the plastic lens and the patient’s eye, says Dr. Greg Moloney, an ophthalmologist and surgeon at the Mount Saint Joseph hospital in Vancouver.
“There is no risk of rejection, because we are using part of the patient’s own body,” he said As happens Host Kӧksal.
Moloney headed the trio of Canadian surgeries this week. All of them were without problems, he says, although patients will be closely monitored.
He has performed seven successful teeth surgeries in his eyes in his native Australia before being recruited to do them in Canada. He says he is used to people reacting with surprise and horror.
“It is a rare operation that most people have not heard, even if you are an eye surgeon,” Moloney said.
It is not a cure for each vision problem, he says. It is specifically intended for people with severe corneal blindness in the front of the eyes caused by conjunctival scars due to autoimmune diseases, chemical burns and other traumas, but who still have a healthy retina and optical nerves at the bottom of their eyes.
And often, Moloney says, it is the last resort when all other options fail.
That is because it is quite intensive, he says. It implies two surgeries, several months apart, which means that Chapman and the other two Canadian patients will return to the operating room at the end of this year.
During the first surgery, Moloney and his colleagues remove the patient’s tooth, shave it in a rectangle and pierce a small hole to accommodate the lens.
Then they remove the scar tissue from the patient’s eye and fill it with a small soft tissue flap from inside his cheek.
Finally, they implant the lens with tooth inside the cheek so that it can grow a new fabric around it.
A few months later, they return, remove the tooth from the cheek and sew it in the front of the eye, under the tissue of the cheek. The result is a pink eye with a small black circle, through which the patient can see.
Because surgery is very intensive, he says they only perform it in one eye.
Not without risk
The procedure is not risk -free, says Maloney.
“With any eye surgery of any kind, there is the possibility that we can introduce infections and lose all our vision,” he said.
However, he says that surgery has been performed for several decades in 10 countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, with a high success rate.
A 2022 study outside Italy found that, on average, 27 years after surgery, 94 percent of patients could still see.
“The risk-reompensation relationship for these patients, when they have no vision, is worth it, we believe,” said Maloney.
Chapman, who spoke with CBC the day before his first surgery on Thursday, says it is worth trying.
The massage therapist says he could see well until he was 13 years old, when he took some ibuprofen after a school basketball game, which caused a rare autoimmune reaction known as Stevens-Johnson syndrome.
He was in a coma for 27 days and had severe burning throughout his body, including his eyes. His view never recovered completely.
In the last 20 years, he says he has had around 50 surgeries, including 10 corneal implants. Sometimes, they say, they work for a few months. A partial vision restored for two whole years.
But, inevitably, he always loses his sight again.
“When I recover it, you know, it would be a big hurry,” he said. “Then I would lose it again and it would be heartbreaking, and I sank into this depression.”
He hopes that these two surgeries at the Mount Saint Joseph hospital are the last.
“I’ve been imagining, you know, play basketball again and shoot hoops,” he said. “I would like to travel more and, you know, just see the world.”
Moloney’s goal is to continue helping patients like Chapman in Canada by opening the country’s first OOKP clinic in Mount Saint Joseph.
The beneficial organization of St. Paul’s Foundation has raised $ 430,000 to start the clinic and finance it for three years, after which the BC Health Agency of Providence Health Care will bend it in its annual budget.
Dr. Samir Jabbour, ophthalmologist at the Hospital Center of L’in.
Jabbour, who did not participate in BC surgeries, says that there are very few cases in which a patient would require this type of rare and complex surgery. But when it happens, they have to assume the cost of traveling outside the country.
“The fact that we now have it in Canada definitely makes it much easier for patient care,” he said.
Chapman says he is incredibly grateful to Maloney and all the others who did this possible.
“Hopefully, this will open some land,” he said. “If there are other people in Canada who may need this and become, you know, something established here, I would feel really great about it.”
