Vision Loss

Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) are unfortunately quite common in humans. Mild cases may only affect your brain temporarily, but other more serious cases can cause long-term complications. TBI can often lead to long-lasting visual impairments like an inability to define shapes, a misalignment of the images that our brain processes from our eyes or a loss of spatial awareness. But why TBI causes these symptoms wasn’t clear until now. Researchers studied mice who had suffered a brain injury (damaged area shown in pink in these brain slices) and discovered that while the primary visual cortex, the region of the brain that processes visual cues, remained intact; there was a significant loss of neurons that were able to relay that information from the eye to the brain. Moreover, this ‘single blow’ appeared to cause permanent damage, but this knowledge is helpful to develop future therapy options including neuron transplantation.

Written by Sophie Arthur

Sophie Arthur

former Science Communications Officer MRC LMS

Formerly a stem cell biologist, Sophie has since moved into science communication working at the MRC LMS. She also writes an award winning science and education blog Soph talks science.

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• Image from work by Jan C. Frankowski and Andrzej T. Foik, and colleagues
• Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Communications Biology, November 2021