Age-related macular degeneration, in which the macula - the key area of the retina responsible for vision - begins to degenerate, is the leading cause of blindness and central vision loss among adults older than 65. Some 10-15 million Americans suffer from the disease.
If those numbers don't scare you, try these: "It affects 14%-24% of the U.S. population aged 65-74 years and 35 -40% of people aged 74 years or more have the disease." Yow!
Most cases of AMD don't lead to blindness. But if the disorder progresses to an advanced stage where abnormal blood vessels accumulate underneath the macula and leak blood and fluid, irreversible damage to the macula can quickly ensue if treatment doesn't arrive right on time.
Timing that treatment just right is a real issue. As I wrote in my recent release about a promising development in this field:
[U]ntil now, there has been no effective way to tell which individuals with AMD are likely to progress to the wet stage. Current treatments are costly and invasive - they typically involve injections of medicines directly into the eyeball - making the notion of treating people with early or intermediate stages of AMD a non-starter. Doctors and patients have to hope the next office visit will be early enough to catch wet AMD at its onset, before it takes too great a toll.
Here's the good news: A team led by Stanford radiologist and biomedical informatician Daniel Rubin, MD, has found a new way to forecast which patients with age-related macular degeneration are likely to progress to the most debilitating form of the disease - and when.
The advance, chronicled in a study in Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, is a formula - derived from extensive computer analysis of thousands of retinal scans of hundreds of patients' eyes - that recommends, on a personalized basis, when to schedule an individual patient’s next office visit in order to optimize the prospect of catching AMD progression before it causes blindness.
The formula predicts, with high accuracy, whether and when a patient with mild or intermediate AMD will progress to the dangerous advanced stage. And it does so simply by crunching imaging data that is already commonly collected in eye doctors’ offices anyway.
“Our technique involves no new procedures in the doctor’s office - patients get the same care they’ve been getting anyway," Rubin told me. His team just tacked on a sophisticated, computerized image-processing step.
Previously: Treating common forms of blindness using tissue generated with ink-jet printing technology, To maintain good eyesight, make healthy vision a priority and Stanford researchers develop web-based tool to streamline interpretation of medical images
Image courtesy of Daniel Rubin
