• Question: If you go blind, can your eyes recover and revert back to their original vision?

    Asked by katrinandlucy to Steve on 15 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 15 Mar 2011:

      Hi KatrinandLucy

      For some forms of blindness, yes, your eyes can recover though not always back to their original best. For example, if you develop cataracts you can undergo a simple operation to remove them, and your vision can then return to almost as good as new. The thing is, you generally have to wear quite thick glasses, and the world would look very blurry without them. For other types of partial blindness, treatments can greatly improve vision, but if the patient has had eye disease and some of the cells in the eye have died, then there is currently no way to replace those lost cells so vision never fully recovers.

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