Macular Degeneration
Age-related loss of sharp central vision used for reading and recognising faces.
The macula is a small patch at the centre of the retina — the part you use to read a phone, recognise a face across a room, thread a needle. Age-related macular degeneration is the gradual wearing-out of that patch, and it's now the leading cause of vision loss in people over sixty in most of the world.
Two very different versions.
Dry macular degeneration is slow — speckled deposits called drusen accumulate over years. Wet macular degeneration is fast and is caused by abnormal new vessels that leak under the retina. Catching the shift from dry to wet quickly is the single biggest predictor of whether central vision can be preserved.
How we treat it.
For dry disease, the best evidence supports a specific high-dose vitamin formula, blood-pressure control, and giving up smoking. Wet disease is treated with eye-drop-level injections that close the leaking vessels — uncomfortable to think about, routine in practice, and one of ophthalmology's quiet success stories.
