e science and clinical treatment of smoking cessation, and will provide the prerequisite data to develop a larger scale clinical trial evaluation of the combination zonisamide + varenicline for smoking cessation. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Varenicline (Chantix) is a successful smoking cessation medication, yet 56% of smokers are unable to quit smoking despite using varenicline. Combining varenicline with zonisamide, an antiepileptic medication that has been associated with smoking reduction, may produce higher smoking quit rates compared to varenicline alone. The information collected from this study will be important for understanding whether combination medication treatments (like varenicline & zonisamide) produce more robust smoking cessation outcomes when compared to medications administered independently, and may be used to guide the development of smoking cessation studies for smokers who have not responded optimally to other currently available smoking cessation pharmacotherapies.

Newborn and juvenile eyes have an emmetropization mechanism that uses visual signals to precisely adjust the axial length of the eyes to the optical power, so that images are in sharp focus. However, nearly 30% of the U.S. population develops axial myopia, in which the eyes are elongated relative to the focal plane. Although glasses, contact lenses and refractive surgery can provide an optical correction, the increased axial length of the eye significantly raises the risk of retinal detachment, choroidal neovascularization and glaucoma, making myopia the 7th leading cause of blindness in the U.S. The emmetropization mechanism has at least three main components: 1) the retina, which responds to the sign and amount of defocus (or other visual cues); 2) a signaling cascade that originates in the retina, travels through the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) and choroid, and reaches the sclera (the fibrous outer coat of the eye); and 3) fibroblasts in the sclera which respond to the signaling cascade by regulating the axial length. Our 