VIDEO: Good screening ‘most important AMD prevention strategy’

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.

The most important AMD prevention strategy, first and foremost, is good screening. It's imperative that patients seek out a retina specialist, get an optical coherence tomography examination, get a fungus examination of their retina. And some of these changes can really be subtle. So, it's important that they look at all these items together, visual acuity, the OCT, progression or changes from previous associates in the hands of a retina specialist can really help to determine whether they have the progression to wet macular degeneration or to drive disease. And for each of these conditions, there's treatable things that we can do to help the patient. Again, I mentioned to you before that for dry disease, vitamin therapy has now shown 10 years of effective data over two different randomized clinical trials. So, I think it's imperative for patients to start vitamin therapy with intermediate forms of macular degeneration or with advanced disease in one eye. In addition, I would say to you that adherence to anti-VEGF therapy is of primary importance to making sure that there is good visual outcomes with regards to treatment. And lastly, I would say to you that one of the important factors we've begun to realize, and this came out after multiple studies now, is that baseline visual acuity really predicts visual outcome. And so coming in with better vision, getting screened earlier in the process, not waiting for weeks or months for things to go by before you get to screening is, I think, another very, very important thing to making sure patients are adherent and can get the best possible outcomes from treatment.