When will I see AMD treatment results?

When will I see the results of treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration? The treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration involves small injections to the eye under a local anaesthetic.

Immediately after the treatment, you may get one or two little tiny bubbles or circles in the vision and a smoky appearance which will disappear over a few hours.

The vision can also be slightly blurred immediately after the treatment. After a day or two, the vision should be back how it was before treatment, and then the results of the treatment itself can take a few weeks or a few months to manifest.

In the longer term, we know that approximately 90% of patients that I treat have stable vision over a period of two or three years and indeed as many as a third or 40% of people have a meaningful improvement in vision over that period.

Although the majority of people need at least three injections before we see results, occasionally people experience an improvement in vision with as little as 1 or 2 injections.

The injections work by reducing leak from the abnormal blood vessels responsible for wet age-related macular degeneration, but the injections don’t eliminate these blood vessels, and so repeated injections are needed to achieve the best results in the long-term.

Recently there have been research studies assessing the impact of injections on quality of life, and a good example of this is included here. The results of this research showed that injection treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration improves patients’ vision-related quality of life in those who gain vision and maintains vision-related quality of life in those who maintain vision in their treated eye, irrespective of whether the worse or better eye is treated.

This research shows the value of treating wet age-related macular degeneration, even if the eye with worse or weaker vision is treated because a loss of vision in the worse-seeing eye will adversely affect a person’s vision-related quality of life.