VIDEO: Importance of adhering to follow-up recommendations for AMD treatment

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.

You know, it's important to understand that patient adherence can really affect the outcome of macular degeneration, and no greater time is tested this than during COVID. We had lots of patients not adhering to follow-up recommendations because they thought their disease wasn't urgent. Clearly, this was recommended that they continued for therapy despite the COVID-19 pandemic, and so we lost some patients during that time. And in particular the two studies that I've authored really showed the effect of that loss to follow up or the delay in treatment effect in patients. The first study was published in Ophthalmology Retina this year, and showed the detriment of vision of five letters by missing a single visit for anti-VEGF therapy in a patient population that we just discussed. The second was another study that we just published as well this last year, which looked at a three month delay in treating these patients. If a patient, for example, was lost for three months what effect did that have on the final visual acuity outcome and for macular degeneration in particular it had a bottom line of difference even after resuming good effective treatment for the rest of the year. So that was a really a paramount studies that have shown us that these drugs while we think that they are durable they cause irreparable harm when there is a lack of adherence to the followup recommendations.