Project FATTY - Nutrition and occular health: is there a link?

February 21, 2008 This is the question to which the scientists in the “Eye and Nutrition” team of the research unit FLAVIC will be attempting to answer in the next two years.

Their research will take place within the framework of the project FATTY (an acronym taken from the words “Factors of nutrition, AThero-Thrombose et maculopathY”). FATTY has received accreditation from Vitagora and funding from the Burgundy Regional Council, Bausch & Lomb – a US multinational especially interested in links between vision and nutrition –, INRA* and the Dijon University Hospital. This project may allow its team, co-directed by Lionel Bretillon and Catherine Creuzot-Garcher, to confirm a hypothesis that a number of small scale studies have indicated.

“The AREDS study (Age Related Eye Disease Study), funded by the National Institute of Health in Bethesda in the US, in particular showed that a significant consumption of Omega-3 could prevent Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD)”, says Lionel Bretillon.

The first stage of the project has already been launched, consisting of esetablishing a cohort of elderly patients. They have been recruited from the register of coronary incidents kept by the Côte-d’Or district in Burgundy – in order to integrate the aspects of cardiology – or from the register of cerebral vascular incidents – for the neurological aspect. Some patients have also been recruited from geriatric services where elderly patients often present symptoms of AMD.

“Among these patients, we are going to study if nutritional factors predispose them to developing this pathology”, explains Lionel Bretillon. This research is all the more important for the fact that a large number of people suffer from this disease. In France alone, the number is estimated at around 1.25 million. Besides the basic research element, the scope of this project is promising for long term practical applications. “There are already a number of nutritional supplements on the market that we suspect could offer an improvement to eye function”, says Lionel Bretillon.

*INRA – the French national institute of agronomic research (Institut National de Recherche Agronomique)

Contact
Lionel Bretillon
Equipe Oeil et Nutrition
UMR FLAVIC
Email: bretillon@dijon.inra.fr

Source: Agence JFD and Co