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NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) – The cancer take Avastin could help preclude cecity in early babies born before their eyes matured completely, the same aggregation that affected singer Stevie Wonder, according to a U.S. study.

About 50,000 grouping worldwide are blind, including Wonder, because of this condition, known as "retinopathy of prematurity" (ROP) for its personalty on the retina.

The study, reportable in The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that a single shot of Avastin into the eyes of early babies prevented cecity more effectively than laser surgery, the customary method used when there are signs of problems.

While more research is needed, the ease of the participation and its reddened fleshly burden on frail babies are pluses, said Helen Mintz-Hittner of the University of Texas Health Science Center, who was lead author.

The shot "takes a few seconds," she told Reuters Health.

As anti to this process, which involves in every numbing the baby's eyes and injecting the inexpensive drug, laser surgery takes primary equipment and requires both administration and a breathed tube.

"It's a major clinical setback for a child whose tube haw hit meet been removed," Mintz-Hittner said.

Roche's Avastin, known generically as bevacizumab, is approved by the U.S. FDA for individual cancers, including colon cancer that has spread.

In the study, 150 early infants were randomly assigned to hit their eyes treated with injections or with lasers. All had advanced retina alteration in the zones of the retina nearest to the optic nerve, which carries aggregation from the eye to the brain.

Among the 75 infants who received Avastin and whose alteration was in the zone of the retina closest to the optic nerve, 6 proportionality had a repetition of ROP compared with 42 proportionality treated with laser surgery.

For babies like these, traditionally among the hardest cases to treat, this is "a true breakthrough," wrote saint painter of the University of Buffalo in New York, in an editorial publicised along with the article about the study.

Conventional laser therapy permanently destroys the murder vessels activity marginal vision, but the injections earmark for continued murder vessel growth, the researchers said.

Though the safety of the injections could not be assessed because there were digit few babies in the study, because so many adults with cancer hit taken the drug, and the dose was rattling small, it "seems reasonable to assume" that the injections are innocuous and at small as innocuous as laser treatment, painter said.

But he did emphasize the injections were not without some risk, adding that the timing was critical.

Mintz-Hittner said the findings module be especially important in nations where more early babies are extant but monitors are not acquirable to preclude the newborns from being unclothed to too such oxygen, which sets the stage for the disease.

"I conceive it's going to be embraced pretty quickly and widely accepted," she added.

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/g5guqz

(Reporting by Gene Emery at Reuters Health; redaction by Elaine Lies)

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