Can Exercise Help to Prevent Vision Loss?

Before we begin, we need to understand the basics of choroidal neovascularization (CNV). According to medscape.com:

Choroidal neovascularization describes the growth of new blood vessels that originate from the choroid through a break in the Bruch membrane into the subretinal pigment epithelium (sub-RPE) or subretinal space.

CNV basically means that there's a harmful overgrowth of blood vessels in the eyes. Symptoms include:

• Colors losing their brightness

• Colors appearing differently in each eye

• Distorted vision

• Loss of vision without pain

• Sizes of objects appearing differently in each eye

• Flashes of light or flickering occurring in your central vision

So, you can understand why researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine were pretty excited when they discovered that exercise can reduce this issue by up to 45 percent ... in mice, anyway.

The paper, Voluntary Exercise Suppresses Choroidal Neovascularization in Mice, is the first experimental evidence that shows exercise can reduce the severity of macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.

Research shows that exercise can reduce the severity of macular degeneration, a leading cause of vision loss.

Researcher Bradley Gelfand, Ph.D., told Science Daily:

There has long been a question about whether maintaining a healthy lifestyle can delay or prevent the development of macular degeneration. The way that question has historically been answered has been by taking surveys of people, asking them what they are eating and how much exercise they are performing ... The problem with that is that people are notoriously bad self-reporters ... and that can lead to conclusions that may or not be true. This [study] offers hard evidence from the lab for the very first time.

The research

To determine the effectiveness of exercise on CNV, two tests were done. One test, which compared mice that voluntarily exercised versus those that did not, found that exercise reduced the blood vessel overgrowth by 45 percent. Then, a second test was done to confirm the findings. It found a reduction of 32 percent. 

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