TB EYE

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Assessment of visual system structural and Functional biomarkers in traumatic brain injury

• IRAS ID

  178042

• Contact name

  Justin McKee

• Contact email

  justin.mckee@ndcn.ox.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Oxford

• Duration of Study in the UK

  0 years, 7 months, 1 days

• Research summary

  The purpose of this study is to use tests of the eyes and vision, to help us to understand how the brain and the eyes respond to head injury.
  Head injury is an increasingly common occurrence. It is also being increasingly recognised not only do severe head injuries cause problems at the time of injury, but can have lasting effects on many aspects of life.
  Amongst these effects, the parts of the brain responsible for vision, and the eyes themselves, appear to be quite sensitive to head injury. This can be the case even if the eyes themselves are not directly injured during the head injury. In such cases people can develop problems like double vision, and also just generalised blurring of vision or difficulty with seeing finer detail.
  Although we know that vision is affected after head injury, at this stage we don’t know if any of these visual symptoms are affected by damage to nerve tissue at the back of the eye. Early research in the laboratory has suggested that there is likely to be loss or damage to the nerve tissue after a head injury, as part of a general response of the nerve tissue to having a brain injury. This makes sense because we know that the nerve tissue at the back of the eye, can be viewed as an extension of the brain itself.
  In this study we want to use very simple scanning techniques, measures of eye movements, visual tests, and memory tests to find out if there is loss of nerve tissue at the back of the eye in people who have suffered severe head injury in the past.
  This study is funded by the John Fell Fund and is taking place in the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford

• REC name

  South Central - Hampshire B Research Ethics Committee

• REC reference

  15/SC/0253

• Date of REC Opinion

  18 Jun 2015

• REC opinion

  Further Information Favourable Opinion