Health Update

If your vision is getting blurred or distorted and most especially if you’re past 50, Dr. Amadeo Veloso, a retina specialist and assistant medical director of the Asian Eye Institute (AEI) at Rockwell Center, Makati City, recommends that you see an eye doctor fast.

“Chances are that the person bothered by such an eye difficulty is on the way to or already suffering from age-related macular degeneration (AMD),” said Veloso, who did postgraduate studies at the Schepens Eye Institute of the Harvard Medical School in Boston for two and a half years following his graduation from the UP College of Medicine and residency training at the St. Luke’s Medical Center as an eye doctor specializing in retina and vitreous (eye fluid) diseases.

If untreated, a person with AMD, he said, won’t go totally blind but will suffer the terrible consequence of losing his central vision.

“He can still move around because his peripheral sight stays, but not his central vision which equips him with the capability to take in the fine details of what’s before him,” he said.

Macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in persons aged 55 and older in the US. It is a medical condition in which the light sensing cells in the macula, the central area of the retina, malfunction and, over time, cease to work.

AMD begins with characteristic yellow deposits in the macula called drusen. People with drusen can go on to develop advanced AMD, which has two forms, dry and wet.

The dry form causes vision loss when the photoreceptors and cells supporting them in the central part of the eye die. At best, treatment for dry AMD can only control the condition.

The wet form of advanced AMD, on the other hand, causes vision loss due to the abnormal growth of the blood vessels under the macula. Bleeding, leaking and scarring from these blood vessels eventually cause irreversible damage to the photoreceptors and supporting cells, if left untreated.

Presently, there are a lot of treatments available for wet AMD. Of these, Veloso and another Harvard-trained retina specialist at the AEI, Dr. Harvey Uy, have extensive experience using the drug pegaptanib. Injected directly into the eye, the drug, according to the two doctors, works fast and has no known serious adverse effects.

Since its approval in the country by the Bureau of Food and Drugs on Oct. 14, 2005, Veloso has treated about 25 to 30 patients who have had at least more than one injection of pegaptanib each.

“After four or six injections, all of them have responded very well to the drug,” said Veloso. “The AMD was controlled, meaning the abnormal growth of the blood vessels under the macula was prevented and so were the bleeding, leakage and swelling.”

Being the first doctor to have used pegaptanib in Asia, Uy, a retina specialist who trained at UP College of Medicine-Philippine General Hospital, St. Luke’s Medical Center, and Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary of the Harvard Medical School, reported similarly positive experiences with the drug.

He said he has had about eight patients so far on pegaptanib therapy. “My patients’ vision usually quickly stabilized as a result of pegaptanib therapy, meaning their vision stopped getting worse,” he said.

Uy and Veloso both maintained that the best way to lessen the chances of developing AMD is to keep the macula healthy by having a healthy lifestyle, and avoiding smoking, too much sun exposure and fatty food, keeping blood pressure and cholesterol count at normal levels, eating vegetables and other foods rich in vitamin A, and undergoing regular retinal examination.

Genes also play a crucial factor in the development of AMD. “If you come from a family with a history of eye problems, you must see your eye doctor regularly,” they advised.

Source: Philippine Star
http://www.philstar.com/index.php?Science%20and%20Technology&p=49&type=2&sec=36&aid=2007071847