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How Do I Know If I Have It?

Your ophthalmologist will inspect the macula as part of a routine eye exam.  A painless photographic procedure, called fluorescein angiography, shows the pattern of your eye's blood vessels and can detect abnormalities.

How Is Macular Degeneration Treated?

Macular degeneration is not reversible, so people who develop age-related macular degeneration (ARMD) typically compensate with large-print publications and magnifying lenses for everyday activities. Wet ARMD may be successfully treated with laser surgery. Successful treatment may not mean restoring normal vision, but rather, preventing central vision loss from becoming worse. A consideration, however, is that while laser surgery can destroy the abnormal blood vessels, it also could damage some of the neighboring retinal tissue.

Alternative remedies may address some effects of the disease, but be sure to check with your doctor.

Conventional Medicine

The more common dry macular degeneration cannot be cured, but patients with the condition should continue to remain under an ophthalmologist's care to monitor the affected eye. Also, if the other eye is healthy, screening still should continue, to stay on the lookout for problems.

For the wet form, there are several surgical procedures that may be used depending on the size and type of the abnormal blood vessels.

• One surgical procedure, called laser photocoagulation, destroys leaking blood vessels that have grown under the macula and halts the damage.
• A newer laser procedure called photodynamic therapy uses a different laser to treat abnormal blood vessels and a medication injected into the patient's arm. This medication travels through the bloodstream and attaches itself to the abnormal blood vessels, so when the laser light is shown in the eye, the blood vessels alone are destroyed.

Both of these procedures must be done before the abnormal blood vessels leak and cause irreversible damage to the retina. More blood vessels could grow later on, so people who get this treatment need to continue to have follow-up appointments.

How Can I Prevent Macular Degeneration?

ARMD cannot be prevented, but it may be controlled with the help of your ophthalmologist. See your eye doctor if you have any symptoms of ARMD and make sure you keep regularly scheduled eye exams.