Man regains sight after doctors replace his eye with a tooth

Published October 7, 2013 6:06pm

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But what about a tooth for an eye?

This could well be the case of Ian Tibbetts, a blind man whose sight was restored after his surgeon fashioned an eye implant using part of his tooth.

UK's The Telegraph reported Tibbetts, 43, slowly lost his eyesight starting 1997, when scrap metal from an oven hit him in the right eye, and he slowly lost his remaining eyesight.

Before he underwent the unusual surgery in December 2012, Tibbetts, 43, had never seen his four-year-old twins Callum and Ryan, just seeing them as blurry shapes.

"I have my independence back now and I can start looking after the kids while my wife is out at work. Before, the kids were just shapes. I couldn't make them out. I had to actually learn to tell them apart by their voices... I would do anything to get some sight back. I had to try something. I said anything is better than what it was," he said.

The story is to be shown in a BBC One documentary "The Day I Got My Sight Back," the report said.

Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis

The procedure is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis (OOKP), and constructs a new eye with a tiny plastic lens and one of the patient's own teeth.

In the procedure, the surgeon inserts the lens into a hole drilled through the tooth, which is implanted in the eye.

"Remarkably, because the tooth belongs to the patient, the body does not reject it," The Telegraph said.

However, the report added this works only for certain types of blindness, and only one surgeon in Britain - Christopher Liu at the Sussex Eye Hospital in Brighton - can do it.

"Patients who have the surgery are often able to see immediately and the quality of sight can be extraordinarily good. However it is only suitable for certain types of blindness, specifically patients who have severe and irreversible corneal damage," he said.

He added the procedure may take five years to master. — TJD, GMA News

Tags: blindness, medicine, tooth