What are your results like for AMD treatment?
What are my results like for treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration? In general terms, we expect about 90% of patients to remain stable once they’ve started AMD treatment. What that means is that they can avoid a significant deterioration in the quality of vision over one, two or three years. But in my hands, the figures are approximately 92-95% based on my NHS and in my private practice.
Not only can we stabilise vision in people who have wet age-related macular degeneration, but a proportion of patients with wet AMD have an improvement in the quality of vision with eye injections. I would expect up to half of my patients to have some improvement in vision with treatment and up to 40% to have a significant improvement in sight.
The other important thing to discuss when talking about my AMD treatment results is that I’m not only talking about a short-term improvement in visual acuity. I’m talking about maintaining or gaining vision over several years and which helps you to get back to doing the things that you want to do such as being able to read, watch television, go out and maintain your independence.
Vision is so much more than just reading letters on a chart and AMD treatment can lead to meaningful improvements in all aspects of vision function.
Recent research I have led has tackled the question of whether eye injections for wet AMD has a beneficial effect on being able to read. The results show that on average, regular treatment for wet AMD with eye injections leads to improvements in reading, both in terms of reading smaller print and also helps with the fluency (reading speed). There are instances when AMD treatment slows down vision loss but does not seem to lead to improvement in vision.
Why does AMD sometimes not improve vision?
There are potentially 3 reasons for this.
The important thing is to start injection treatment early for wet AMD to prevent damage to retinal cells before bleeding, scarring and dry AMD lead to permanent loss of vision and to have regular injections to help sustain any improvement in the long-term.