2024-01-02 13:00:00
The story is ten years old this year and led to a scientific discovery: star-shaped electrical burns were discovered in an electrician’s eyes.
In 2014, a 42-year-old Californian electrician developed a very strange cataract following being violently electrocuted at 14,000 volts during a work accident. When he hit his shoulder, an electrical wire pumped a current of 14,000 volts into his body, burning his optic nerve (which connects the eyes to the brain). At the time, Dr. Bobby Korn, a professor of clinical ophthalmology at the University of California, San Diego, treated the anonymous patient and told NBC News : “The optic nerve is like any wire carrying electricity. In this case, the extreme current and voltage flowing through this important natural wire damaged the optic nerve itself.“
Four weeks following the accident, the patient began to suffer from a severe cataract and four months later, he had to have surgery to remove what might be of the cataract and allow him better vision. A decade later, the vision of this former electrician is unfortunately still poor.
Bad luck which allowed researchers to publish an article on star-shaped electrical burns in the eyes, in the New England Journal of Medicine. But it is difficult to explain why the scars take on this star shape. “In animal studies, damage to the lens caused by electricity first appears as small bubbles called vacuoles on the outside of the lens. These bubbles then merge to form a star-shaped cataract“, explains Dr. Bobby Korn.
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