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Research with gastric mucus against dry eyes?
Many people spend most of their working time on the computer. Sitting at your desk all day and staring at the screen often causes problems with your eyes. In the long term, this can also damage the ocular tissue. Researchers have now found that a natural mucilage component can help here.
Dry eyes through long screen work
Anyone working on the computer for several hours every day will eventually get dry eyes. In the trade, although drops are available for the complaints, but the funds are often without effect. In addition, they should in principle be used only with caution, as it can come, among other things by the preservatives contained to damage the eye. Researchers from Munich now report what could help those affected: a component of the gastric mucosa.
Dry eyes and rubbing contact lenses after a long day at the computer permanently damage the eye tissue. Eye drops usually bring only a little. Help could bring a natural mucus component. (Image: alco81 / fotolia.com) Natural lubricant
Dry eyes and rubbing contact lenses after a long day at the computer are not only painful, but also permanently damage the eye tissue.
Help could bring a natural mucilage component, a so-called mucin, reports the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in a statement.
A team of TUM could therefore show in a study that contact lenses, which were coated with mucus from the stomach mucous membrane of pigs, caused no damage to the eye.
Mucins are molecules that are able to bind water and thus form a natural lubricant. Not only our tears contain such mucins, they also occur in the protective mucus layer in the stomach or intestine.
Without protective lubricating film tissue of the cornea is injured
Patients with dry eyes often lack this molecular lubricant in the tear fluid: the mucin MUC5AC.
According to the experts, the lack of MUC5AC can be especially problematic when wearing contact lenses: without the protective sliding film between the eye and the lens, the tissue of the cornea is injured.
The scientists around Prof. Oliver Lieleg, Professor of Biomechanics and head of the working group "Biopolymers and Bio-Interfaces" at the Munich School of BioEngineering, therefore had the idea to apply the missing mucin directly to the lens.
Mucin coating prevents tissue damage
For the experiments, the researchers needed larger amounts of the molecule. Human tears turned out to be a possible source. The team therefore developed a procedure to isolate mucin from the stomachs of pigs.
This pig's mucin is very similar in structure to the human molecule MUC5AC. It was particularly important that the substance retains its characteristic property as a lubricant and does not change chemically through the cleaning process.
"Most hitherto commercially available mucins currently available e.g. have been used for the treatment of dryness in the mouth, have lost exactly this ability, we have been able to show in several experiments. You could also spray water into your mouth. Therefore, these mucins can not help with dry eyes, "explained Lieleg.
In experiments on a prepared pig's eye, they then tested how their specially-isolated mucin acts on contact lenses. The research team was able to prove microscopically that no tissue damage occurred through the lenses when it was coated with mucin.
"We have found that the mucin adheres to the lens material by itself and therefore keeps it lubricious," said Benjamin Winkeljann, first author of the study.
From the scientists' point of view, it would therefore be sufficient to store the contact lenses in a mucin solution overnight, for example.
Permanent protection without dripping
Coating with mucin has several advantages: Medicines that are already on the market for dry eyes primarily use hyaluronic acid. However, unlike mucin, it does not occur in human tears.
While hyaluronic acid is introduced into the eye as a drop and therefore has to be applied repeatedly throughout the day, mucin adheres directly to the lens and protects the eye permanently.
In the next steps, the mucin from the pigmine should be tested further in order to be able to use it soon in humans. (Ad)