What is it about?

This is about a creative way to help people with really bad dry eyes. Doctors are taking saliva glands from other parts of the body and moving them to the eyes to help make tears. They've tried using different types of spit glands, but they've found that one type works best - the submandibular gland, which is under your jaw.

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Why is it important?

Dry eyes can be super uncomfortable and hard to treat when they're severe. This surgery gives hope to people who've tried everything else. It's pretty amazing because: It can help for more than 20 years after the surgery It uses your own body parts, so there's less chance your body will reject it It can really improve how your eyes feel and work

Perspectives

While this sounds like a wild idea, it's actually working well for many people. Here's the overall picture: Doctors prefer using the submandibular gland because it has fewer complications They're working on ways to control how much the moved gland produces, so you don't end up with too many or too few tears They're also looking at using smaller spit glands from the lip, which is working well long-term Before doing the surgery, they carefully measure how much saliva the glands make to pick the best one

Prof Louis Tong
National University of Singapore

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Salivary Gland Transplantation as a Promising Approach for Tear Film Restoration in Severe Dry Eye Disease, Journal of Clinical Medicine, January 2024, MDPI AG,
DOI: 10.3390/jcm13020521.
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