Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) is an eye condition that causes severe vision loss, attacking the macula of the eye where our sharpest central vision occurs. AMD affects all aspects of life, greatly complicating the completion of even the simplest of tasks. This disease rarely results in complete blindness but diminishes the quality of vision substantially, leaving the patient only with their outermost peripherals.
Dry and wet AMD are the two forms of this eye disease, with the latter being the most severe. Although wet age-related macular degeneration only affects about 15% of people with this condition, it accounts for 90% of patients’ vision loss. It is very detrimental to the eye and can lead to rapidly declining vision due to the way in which it disrupts the eye and how quickly this disruption takes place.
With this specific type of AMD, the oxygen supply to the macula is compromised and the body reacts by growing new blood vessels to increase the amount of blood and oxygen transported to the eye. However, these new blood vessels are usually abnormal and fragile, continuously growing and leaking blood. With the increase of blood vessels and their abnormalities, scarring in the macula occur resulting in rapid central vision loss.
The most disheartening aspect of this disease is once the vision is destroyed it cannot be fixed, making current treatments for this disease preventive rather than providing an actual cure. With that being said, great strides have been made in increasing the effectiveness of these preventative measures. This provides patients with a promising future to prevent blindness due to this condition.
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Macular Degeneration Diagrams
How a Cancer Drug Can Prevent Vision Loss
In light of the absence of a cure and in the presence of discovery and new research, Doctors have started to apply principles of cancer therapy to treatments of AMD, considering that these diseases both involve growth of blood vessels, one being in a tumor cell and the other the eye.
With this in mind, doctors have begun to use Avastin, a colon cancer drug that attacks and prevents the creation of abnormal blood vessels, as a treatment for wet age-related macular degeneration with the hope that it will decrease the amount of abnormal blood vessels in the eye and prevent scarring of the macula. In experimental treatments, researchers found that about half of the participants recovered vision with 20/40 or better and another 10% returned to normal, 20/20, vision.
Although doctors still have a ways to go in perfecting this treatment, as well as finding a similar solution for dry AMD, this new discovery in treatment is one to celebrate and is the first step to finding a permanent way to prevent blindness due to AMG.
