How long does AMD treatment take?

How long does AMD treatment take? Treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration involves an injection into the eye under a local anaesthetic. When you come and see me; once we’ve agreed that that’s the right treatment plan for you, the treatment itself can take about 20 minutes to set up.

Those 20 minutes involves the preparation, including getting you ready for the injection and making sure that you’re comfortable, putting all the eye drops in and performing the injection. The actual injection itself takes seconds; it’s probably taken me longer to talk about it than to perform the procedure.

It’s a painless procedure

Thankfully, with the drops we use to numb the eye, the procedure itself is painless. The other part of my answer I guess related to how long does the treatment take concerning the course of treatment. We now know that a single treatment itself is not effective regarding long-term stability and improvement of vision in patients with wet age-related macular degeneration.

On average people can need approximately three to seven injections in the first year. But that varies from individual to individual, so when you come and see me we’ll discuss the treatment plan based on how things look, the severity of the wet age-related macular degeneration and indeed those first steps regarding your initial response to treatment.

Regarding the long-term and over a few years patients can need recurrent or repeated injections to the eye, but I’m thankful to say the number of injections tends to decrease as we move from the acute phase of treatment into the second phase of treatment and indeed the second and third year and after that. So the requirement for treatment diminishes over time. However, most patients are best served by giving injections regularly.

And one of the reasons for that is because we know that the best way of delivering long-term stability and improvement for your vision is really by carrying out the injections regularly but spacing them out as much as possible to make the treatment plan tolerable for you yet not compromise on the quality of your vision.