Back again after vacuuming the living room and filling both the washer and the dishwasher. Starting to wonder which is worse. I have always been a little crazy but tackling some of this research stuff is, well, nuts!
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be” said the Cat “ or you wouldn’t have come here.”
Now that THAT is settled….the article, Clinical Endpoints, etc. talks about how using spectral domain OCT can even predict where GA will spread in your macula. With no way to stop it, I might want to be ignorant of where the condition will hit next, but the authors opine being able to discover new biomarkers may indicate new directions for therapies, something we want to hear.
The article then moved over to the wet side of the street. I only had testing for wet AMD one time. They shot me up with ‘carrot juice’ aka beta carotene, and then used what was probably either fluorescein angiography or indocyanine green angiography to look for leaks.
Back to a more general discussion, did anyone ever put electrodes on your corneas and shine a light in your eyes? Multifocal electroretinography measures the strength of the signal coming off your photoreceptors when exposed to light. And I am just full of bad news today, but there appears to be a diminution of the signal strength even in early AMD.
We have talked at some length about dark adaptation and contrast sensitivity. We even mentioned the contrast test they talk about, Pelli-Robson. Allow me a moment of satisfaction for that one?.
On to one I never heard of: microperimetry. This test put stimuli on very specific parts of your macula and you hit the old button if your see them. Your fixation point is monitored so if you “cheat your sweet patootie off” like I do – in other words use eccentric viewing instead of putting my poor, ravished fovea on the target – they will know.
Other than suggesting where on your retina you can actually put your eccentric viewing, the ‘maps’ from microperimetry also give an idea of where the atrophy is going to spread. Not that I want to know perhaps. And even more bad news is the study quoted found even functional macular tissue was compromised.
I think I need to stop reading this cursed study. It is depressing!
Okay, the last section of the article talked about quality of life. Finally, back to my neck of the woods. Remember: social scientist here.
And some last thoughts:
It is just fine to put problems you cannot solve away until you actually have the resources to deal with them. In DBT (and no, I have not forgotten about that) it is called pushing away. I share good news and bad. It is up to you to pick out the things that are helpful and put away the information that is not helpful or depressing. Even the depressing findings add to our knowledge base and lead us towards treatments and maybe even a cure. Let the researchers deal with the depressing stuff.
“I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and ignore the rest.” – Venus Williams
October 8th, 2017