Blindness Hazard: Gene variant tied to macular degeneration

People who make a particular form of an immune system protein have a heightened risk of developing old-age blindness, three teams of researchers report in an upcoming Science.

In a search for the factors underlying age-related macular degeneration—a deterioration of the eye that is the primary cause of vision loss in the elderly—the researchers have implicated one of several variants of the gene that encodes the protein called complement factor H, or CFH.