First corneal implant on U.S. dog
Dixie’s eyesight had gotten so bad that she had taken to walking directly behind her master when they went for a walk, afraid to venture out of his shadow.
The 7-year-old Mountain Cur stopped running and playing, and began to gain weight. But “even when she was almost blind,” said her owner, Brett Williams of Runnells, Iowa, “she was still my best dog.”
Recently, Dixie became the first dog in the U.S. to receive a corneal implant – and it worked.
Dixie's sight was restored through a two-step surgical procedure that involves cutting into the eye to take out the cloudy cornea and stitching into place a permanent, plastic cornea. The entire eye is then covered with tissue from the dog to help it heal. After several weeks in bandages, a hole is cut into the tissue, exposing the new plastic cornea.
The new cornea is working for Dixie, but she has very little peripheral vision, said Sinisa Grozdanic, an assistant professor of Veterinary Clinical Sciences at Iowa State University, who performed the surgery.
"She is visual," he said. "For Dixie, it's like looking through a peephole."
Grozdanic became interested in the surgery after attending a conference and meeting a representative of a German company called Acrivet, which is developing the plastic corneas. The implant used was a prototype, and they are not yet available commercially, according to the company. Given the success of Dixie’s operation, though, they may soon be.
Dixie has been a patient of Grozdanic for four years during which he had worked to restore, or at least retain, Dixie's deteriorating eyesight.
According to Grozdanic, corneal transplants -- using live corneal tissue from other dogs -- have a low success rate because of the high likelihood of rejection.
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