Hot Topics in AMD

Treatment Burden

August 02, 2023
2 min watch
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AMD patients experience massive treatment burden

Transcript

Editor's note: This is an automatically generated transcript. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Our main issue with the management of age-related macular degeneration is currently we have no, I'll call 'em easy, therapies. So a pill, an eye drop, something easy for the patient to do. All of our therapies require an intravitreal injection, and it requires it relatively frequent intervals. So in dry macular degeneration, it's either monthly, or every other month. In wet macular degeneration, it could be monthly, all the way out to 16 to 20 week intervals. So it's a little better in wet macular degeneration than dry but there's a massive treatment burden, both in terms of time, as well as in cost. These are very costly medications, and it costs our healthcare system a lot of money to save this amount of visual acuity. So the treatment burden is huge in macular degeneration. For dry macular degeneration, there's really very little we can do outside of testing new treatments that last longer than what we currently have. We really have no way to increase the treatment interval. In contrast, in wet macular degeneration, there is a large proportion of the patients that can do very well with an extended interval between their injections. And what we do when we treat our patients is to try, and find those patients that can go for extended intervals. And we use this using a treatment paradigm called Treat and Extend where we extend the interval as long as the patient's doing well, and we contract the interval that the patient's doing poorly. And in general, the vast majority of patients do very well with this Treat and Extend paradigm. But more importantly, treatment burden is also being evaluated in clinical studies with longer acting polymers, and even gene therapy for both these diseases.

In this video, Peter K. Kaiser, MD, founding director of the Digital Eye Optical Coherence Tomography Reading Center at the Cole Eye Institute, discusses the "massive treatment burden" of the available therapies for age-related macular degeneration.

Patients may struggle with the frequency of the intravitreal injections or the cost.

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