What are AMD symptoms?

What are AMD symptoms? In its early stages, age-related macular degeneration or AMD doesn’t have to cause any symptoms, it can be asymptomatic, and often people are warned or told they have the condition when they see their optician or optometrist on the high street.

As the condition worsens, we see more accumulation of waste material underneath the retina, and this can start affecting our vision in very subtle ways at the start. Perhaps problems when you’re out at night or dawn, problems seeing things at dawn and dusk and in poor lighting.

Perhaps a slight difficulty when one is reading or difficulty with driving and perhaps recognising faces. So in the early stages, the symptoms can be quite subtle. As macular degeneration progresses, it can cause worsening symptoms or symptoms of distortion where images look bent or crooked, and people can develop increasing difficulty recognising detail and more problems with reading as well.

And finally in severe or advanced cases of macular degeneration or AMD people will have a loss of their central vision, which prevents them using their straight-on vision for everyday tasks. But they still usually have their peripheral vision intact allowing the ability to navigate and see things at the edge of the visual field.

Different types of AMD

Age-related macular degeneration can progress at different rates. The underlying condition is the dry form of the disease where patients develop a progressive thinning of the retina. And some patients can develop reasonably rapidly over a few years to have symptoms, and other people can remain stable perhaps over five or ten years. But at the moment we don’t have all the answers to why some patients progress rapidly, and other patients progress slowly.

In addition to that at any point along that pathway or spectrum of dry age-related macular degeneration patients can develop wet AMD. And in wet age-related macular degeneration, fragile blood vessels grow into and underneath the retina, and they can cause quite a sudden loss of vision. And that can happen over days or perhaps over a week or two.