The eye is an extremely complex organ. One such disability for which progress is being made towards a partial recovery is blindness. There are 15 million blind and visually impaired people in the United States. What these two groups of diseases have in common is that at present they cannot be treated.
Scientists are busy at work trying to change that given fact.
In RP, the rod and cone cells of the retina degenerate. The rod cells are usually the first to be affected, causing night blindness and loss of peripheral vision. The symptoms may occur at any age, but they most commonly appear in young adults. About half of the cases are inherited, while the remaining cases have no explainable cause. Vision becomes blurry and the eye has trouble distinguishing details, both up close and at a distance.