VIDEO: Exploring the relationship between AMD, mental health

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

So mental health and macular degeneration really do go hand-in-hand. We've known for, you know, quite a while that visual acuity loss and depression do really go hand-in-hand. And so in patients, especially with geographic atrophy, you know, we do see, you know, higher rates of depression. You know, there was a recent Harris poll kind of looking at the emotional burden and the impact on independence caused by geographic atrophy in our patients. And this was a study, you know, that looked at, you know, over 200 patients in nine different countries, and it identified the patients specifically who were suffering from geographic atrophy. And there's just a huge impact on the quality of life with patients that have geographic atrophy. And so, you know, nearly 7 in 10 of the patients that had geographic atrophy felt that the impact in their life was much more than they had ever expected it to be. So, you know, we do counsel our patients when they have macular degeneration. And, clearly, there's an unmet need in some of that counseling because these patients are starting to realize is they have this impact on the disease on their day-to-day life, that this really does make a big impact. And highlighting that even further, you know, two of three of the patients in this survey actually had to rely on a caregiver to help them with their sort of activities of daily life. And so that's a really big change for a lot of these patients who have been used to a level of independence that they suffer from with this disease. And majority of these patients really felt that there was a negative impact on their ability to read, to drive, to travel. And so a lot of the things they enjoy doing, you know, it really had a significant impact on those things for our patients. The other part of this, I think that's important, so knowing that, you know, it's our job as educators of this disease to really kind of look to inform our patients about what they can expect. But even more than that, in the survey, you know, three or four patients sort of attributed their loss of vision. So they were having vision problems, they sort of assumed, well, I'm just getting older and so my eyes just don't work as well. And we know that's the disease itself that was causing this for these patients with geographic atrophy. So again, really educating our patients to say, first of all, if you're having vision changes, you need to be seen, you need to have that evaluated. Because especially as we have these newer therapeutics, there now may be something that we can do. There are modifier risk factors that you might have that we can kind of really get to. And every little bit counts in this because, you know, when you start losing central vision, that really does change your life and has a very negative impact on patients. And finally, just one last point about that, I would say, it's very important that when you have patients that do have these diseases, you really want to try to see about getting them in front of, you know, experts in mental health who may be able to help counsel these patients and also give them, you know, some of the treatment they may need from a mental health perspective because it obviously has a big impact in their day-to-day, and their overall wellbeing to have those needs met as well.