How does AMD treatment work?

How do AMD treatments work?

Treatments for wet age-related macular degeneration are given through injections into the eye under a local anaesthetic, and the way they work is by targeting the protein or chemical that’s upregulated or increased in wet age-related macular degeneration, and that protein is called vascular endothelial growth factor or VEGF.

When you come to the clinic, if you need an injection there are practical points that we need to discuss and need to consider. The important thing to note is that the process of having an eye injection is a lot simpler and more straightforward than it sounds.

Once I have explained that I start by using strong anaesthetic drops to numb the eye so that they don’t feel anything at the time of the injection, people are usually very comfortable about having their first treatment.

After the first appointment

And after their first treatment patients come back for more treatment to help us stabilise the condition, so this shows that it sounds a lot scarier than it actually is in practice. When patients come to see me, we start out with drops that dilate the pupils and to have a look into the eye.

When we’ve established the need for treatment, we put local anaesthetic drops into the eye to numb the eye. And then we clean the eye very thoroughly, and that’s because the main risk of treatment is an infection and so we do all we can to prevent infection.

Once we’ve cleaned the eye and sterilised the eye very thoroughly, we put a clean drape over the eye and use a small clip to keep the eyelids open. With the eyelids open we’re able to carry out this very small injection to the white part of the eye.

The other thing that people are concerned about is whether they’re going to see the injection being performed. I ask patients to look in a particular direction which is away from the place where we actually do the injection so thankfully people don’t actually see the injection at the time of their treatment.

Even though most or all people that I see are very worried about the prospect of having injections all of the patients that I’ve seen actually are very comfortable with the process once everything has been explained to them and we’ve spent the appropriate time answering questions. They’re very comfortable to lie down, have the eye drops and actually have the procedure performed without any problems at all.

They walk in; have the procedure carried out and actually then walk out again with their eye drops ready to go home within a few minutes of having the injection.