Millions of people in the world suffer from the eye condition known as cataracts. Many of these people resort to expensive surgeries to correct their cataracts, but research suggests that antioxidants could help prevent this damage from occurring. The purpose of this experiment was to determine the effect of vitamin C, glutathione, and UV protective lens on eye cells exposed to UV light to determine if these antioxidants could help prevent damage to eye cells. It was hypothesized that if eye cells were treated with vitamin C, glutathione, and UV protective lens, and then exposed to UV radiation, the oxidative damage incurred would be significantly less than that of the control group.
A cellular model was used with three replicates of the experiment to have 10 trials for each treatment. The treatment’s concentrations of vitamin C and glutathione were determined through alpha testing and derived from recommended human dosages. One of the well plates was subjected to UV light, another subjected to UV light with the protective UV lens, and the last had no UV exposure; where the UV plates were exposed for one minute.
None of the treatment groups that were compared showed any significance at the 0.05 level to the central using a t-test. The data from the experiment suggests that antioxidants and the UV protective film have no effect in protecting eye cells from UV radiation. Experimental error within the results could also explain for this data which goes against other research done in this field.