- Night blindness, visual field constriction, and progressive death of photoreceptor cells are symptoms. There is also loss of rod and cone responses on electroretinography and clinical degeneration of the outer retina. - For Stargardt disease, central vision is lost by age 60 and peripheral vision is affected. Patients develop blue blindness. In adolescence, half of the peripheral visual field is lost. Night blindness is the first symptom. - Mutations are natural changes in a DNA sequence that can involve substitution of a single base, deletion of a base, or insertion of an extra base. Mutation leads to different alleles of a gene.