Ophthalmology at Boston Children's Hospital

12/03/2025

We were honored to host representatives from the Knights Templar Eye Foundation, Inc. in late September for a meeting with two of their recent Career Starter Research Grant awardees, Dr. Sampath Vemula and Dr. Manon Szczepan. These grants support early-career researchers in their pursuit of innovative solutions to vision-related challenges. We are deeply grateful for the KTEF’s longstanding commitment to funding critical research, which not only advances eye health but also empowers our fellows to drive breakthroughs in the field.

11/28/2025

Happy Thanksgiving from the Department of Ophthalmology!! 🦃🍽️🍂

11/26/2025

🔍 Breaking Down Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration (nAMD) and New Research 🔍

Neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) is a leading cause of vision loss in older adults. Understanding new pathways can lead to new treatments. 👁️

💉 Current Treatments:
Standard Care: nAMD is currently treated with repeated eye injections to block a protein (VEGF) that causes harmful blood vessel growth in the eye. These treatments are not always effective.

🧬 New Research Insights:
ApoM and S1P: Researchers discovered that a molecule called sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P), carried by apolipoprotein M (ApoM), can reduce harmful blood vessel changes in the eye.

🔄 How It Works: S1P acts through S1P receptors in blood vessels to inhibit abnormal growth, offering a new therapeutic target.

🔬 Promising Findings:
In Mice: Lower ApoM levels led to more damage, while higher levels protected the eye.
New Therapy: A lab-made version of ApoM, called ApoM-Fc, was as effective as current VEGF treatments and also reduced leakage from abnormal vessels.

✅Why This Matters:
This breakthrough offers a potential new treatment that not only controls harmful blood vessel growth but also reduces leakage, a major cause of vision loss.

🧑‍⚕️ Led by Drs. Bongnam Jung and Tim Hla, the research team included Boston Children’s ophthalmology experts Drs. Hitomi Yagi, Zhongjie Fu, and Lois Smith.

🔗 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12018641/

11/14/2025

👁️ Doctors may soon have a new way to tell if kids who have elevated intracranial pressure have had successful reduction of that pressure with a special type of eye imaging exam.

A team of researchers from the Department of Ophthalmology at Boston Children’s Hospital including Drs. Chang, Gise, Estrela and Dagi as well as a medical student, Jacqueline Jeon-Chapman studied PHOMS in children with a skull disorder called craniosynostosis. PHOMS are small, bright spots seen on OCT. These spots often show up when there’s increased pressure in the brain. Our team found that they reliably disappear after the pressure has been relieved surgically.
This means PHOMS could be a helpful, non-invasive sign to guide treatment and check if it worked.

A simple eye scan might make a big difference in caring for children with complex conditions. 🧠👶

To appraise the association of peripapillary hyperreflective ovoid mass-like structures (PHOMS) with the need for intracranial pressure (ICP) decompression surgery, and to study the impact of decompression surgery on the persistence of PHOMS.

10/31/2025

🎃 Halloween is for treats, not trips to the eye doctor! 🍬
Keep costumes and accessories eye-safe for a night full of fun - not fright. 👀👻

10/30/2025

This October, we’re shining our lights purple for Domestic Violence Awareness Month — honoring survivors and standing with families affected by abuse. 💜

Our AWAKE Program, the first of its kind in a pediatric hospital, continues to support survivors and promote healing for all families. http://ms.spr.ly/6185t6BIS

For support, call 617-355-6000 and ask for an AWAKE social worker.

10/30/2025

👶👀 A research study by Boston Children’s Hospital Ophthalmology scientists led by Drs. Vemula and Whitman offers new evidence to understand infantile nystagmus syndrome (INS), a condition that causes involuntary eye movements before babies are six months old. Historically, scientists believed that INS is a result of poor vision but these experiments show something different: the issue may be related to the development of motor neurons that send signals from the brain to the muscles that move your eyes.

Researchers found these defects in albino mice with nystagmus:
• As early as the first week after birth, the nerve “landing zone” on horizontal eye muscles is too narrow, indicating not enough connections being made on the muscles.
• By the second week, the nerve endings themselves are not developing properly and have less of a key protein (synaptophysin) that helps them send signals.
• Around week three, each nerve-muscle junction has fewer of the muscle cell “command centers” that normally sit beneath it, making the junctions weaker.
• In the brainstem, there are abnormalities in the proportion of “slow” and “fast” motor neurons, which control different types of eye movements.

All these defects appear before eye-opening, so are not caused by poor vision, indicating nystagmus stems from early nerve-wiring errors and highlighting the nerve-to-muscle junction as a treatment target.✨👁️

Sampath Vemula, Abdikheyre Osman, Xiguang Yang, Gabriel Aronchik, Mayra Martinez Sanchez, Nafiza Meher, Mary C. Whitman; Disrupted Motor Neuron and Neuromuscular Junction Development in an Albino Mice Model of Infantile Nystagmus. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2025;66(9):25. https://doi.org/10.1167/...

10/17/2025

🧒💥 A Surprising Cause of Head Tilting in Kids? Check the Eyes!

Some children develop torticollis—a condition where the head tilts or turns to one side. It’s often linked to muscle or neurological issues… but what if the cause is something as tiny as a speck in the eye?

👁️ In a case series, authors from Boston Children’s Hospital Ophthalmology (Drs. Zhang, Hunter, and Gaier) report 3 children with unexplained head tilts. The surprising culprit?

➡️ Tiny foreign objects lodged under their upper eyelids.

Here's what happened:
🔹 The kids tilted their heads to avoid painful contact between the object and the surface of the eye.
🔹 Their posture returned to normal immediately after the object was removed.
🔹 In some cases, the foreign body was missed during the first eye exam.

💡 Why this matters:
Foreign bodies in the eye account for nearly a third of all eye-related ER visits in the U.S. If not found and treated, they can cause serious damage like infections or permanent scarring—especially in children, who may not be able to explain what they feel.

👀 If a child has a sudden, unexplained head tilt, it typically includes an eye misalignment, shaking of the eyes (nystagmus), or a need for glasses. Sometimes, the eyes are trying to tell us something.



https://www.jaapos.org/article/S1091-8531(24)00404-X/abstract

10/10/2025

🚀 Eyeing the Future of Eye Care! 👁️💡

Ophthalmology covers a variety of subspecialties; each focused on different parts of the eye or specific conditions. Tracking the locations of these specialists nationwide has long been a challenge. Boston Children's Hospital researchers Ju Hyun Jeon, Drs. Lee, Hunter, Oke and their Harvard colleagues solved this by applying machine learning to ten years of deidentified IRIS® Registry data—training an AI that can identify eight distinct ophthalmology subspecialties with up to 98% accuracy. 🤖🎯

Why it matters:
Real-time tracking of specialists across the country.
Smarter workforce planning and policy decisions.
Better patient access to the right eye care at the right time.

All it takes is looking at what procedures, diagnoses, and prescriptions doctors use—and then letting machine learning do its magic.✨

To develop machine-learning models to identify ophthalmology subspecialists using deidentified patient data from a large database.

10/07/2025

10/03/2025

🌟 Hope for Premature Babies’ Eye Health! 🌟

An international team of researchers led by scientists from Boston Children’s Hospital Ophthalmology Department published a study with new information about preventing Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), a major eye condition that can lead to blindness in premature infants.

🔍 Key Influences:
High blood sugar levels often seen in preterm infants affect ROP.
Premature babies miss important fatty acids, DHA and ARA, normally provided by the mother in utero.

🧪 Exciting Research:
A recent clinical study found that giving preemies an oral mix of both DHA and ARA together can cut the risk of severe ROP by half! It helps their eyes grow healthier, even when blood sugar levels are high. This study describes the mechanism of this effect.

🚼 Why It Matters:
This approach reduces the risk of severe ROP. It is a hopeful step toward healthier eyes for these tiny patients.

👥 Boston Children’s Hospital Scientists:
This project was led by Drs. Myriam Boeck and Lois Smith. Team members from B*H Ophthalmology included Hitomi Yagi, Yan Zeng, Deokho Lee, Shen Nian, Victoria Hirst, Katherine Neilsen, Chaomei Wang, Jeff Lee, and Zhongjie Fu.

👶🍼