Back again. I don’t want to scrub the floor or score a test, soooo….a page!?
Still checking out short blurbs from Modern Retina. Rosenfeld reported that low-luminance visual acuity deficits are predictive of the rate of geographic atrophy (GA) progression. Low-luminance visual acuity is basically night vision.
Following up on this I discovered that back in 2008 Janet Sunness found GA patients who reported poor night vision were much more likely to go legally blind than their GA peers who could see better at night. These people made up the quarter of their GA patients (visual acuity of 20/50 or better) who became legally blind within four years.
I believe them but still have a couple of questions. Recovery time from being ‘blinded’ by bright light is forever for me. Leave me there and come back in an hour.
Night vision is not bad. I prefer to walk without a flashlight because I see better to navigate. How can that be considering I am one of those who became legally blind?
The study measured night vision by seeing how much could be read in low light conditions. Reading in low light, I am not so good. Maybe that is the difference.
Anyway, if you cannot afford a lot of fancy testing, seeing how much you can read at dusk may give you some idea of how bad things are going to get. Just what we want to know; right? How bad things can really be.
And in other news, inflammation remains a target for the AMD researchers. Lampalizumab, aka ‘lamp stuff’, blocks complementary factor D to help control the alternative complement pathway (that thing again!) and reduce retinal inflammation. ‘Lamp stuff’ is said to work with carriers of the complement factor I at risk allele. Considering Regillo wants to start poking needles in my eyes come 2018, I cannot help but wonder if I actually have that gene. I would hate to be poked in the eye every month to no good end.
Maybe I would rather use POT. ?That’s POT 4. POT4, aka APL 2, blocks all three pathways of complement action at the same time. They are looking to develop an intravitreous shot that would be very long-term. None of this four to six weeks business.
And talking about shots, I just lost the article somewhere in this mess (not domestic goddess material; remember?) but I also read a short article taking about a new, medication delivery system they are working on in the UK. This team has been working on developing a little, bitty molecule that can permeate the layers of the eye and deliver medication to the retina through daily eye drops and not monthly shots. Not only will the people getting the shots approve, but the NHS (National Health Service) will approve because it will cut the number of office visits way down. Save money. Ka ching! [Lin/Linda: never fear, I found the article, click here.]
So there you have a review of some of the articles I pulled off of Modern Retina. They have lots in the works. Some of it is promising and some proves not to be, but they are zeroing in on treatments (plural because with a condition caused by multiple genes I believe there will be multiple avenues of attack). We are getting closer to answers. There is hope.
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