New Ways to Protect Your Eyesight As You Age: PreRetirementLife

Text Size:

New Ways to Protect Your Eyesight As You Age

Macular degeneration is a common condition, but there's fresh hope that it can be fought.

Most of us will suffer some deterioration of our eyesight as we age, but for millions of Americans, macular degeneration, one of the most prevalent causes of failing eyesight, will pose a special risk. Luckily, research is leading to new kinds of treatment.

The macula is the area of the retina at the back of your eye that contains the rods and cones you may remember reading about back in high-school biology class. Up to 85 percent of macular degeneration cases are classified as "dry," in which those all-important retinal cells begin to weaken and die off. In cases of the more severe "wet" macular degeneration, new abnormal blood vessels begin to grow and then leak, leading to blurriness, usually in both eyes.

Because one good eye can sometimes compensate for one fading eye, macular degeneration can go undiagnosed if you fail to see an opthamologist regularly. To treat wet macular degeneration, a variety of intimidating laser and surgical techniques are available. Two drugs, Macugen and Lucentis, can also be prescribed, and a third drug, Avastin, which is meant to treat colon and rectal cancer, has been used off-label as a treatment but is not approved by the FDA for this kind of use.

Dry macular degeneration doesn't lend itself to that kind of treatment, and most patients merely ride it out as they age. Now, however, there's some home in Kenalog, a steroid drug that's normally used to flight eye inflammation. Additionally, a blood-filtering technique called rheophoresis is also being researched.

The best recent news comes out of a joint study between researchers at Harvard and in Japan which tried out an experimental drug called Endostatin. According to results published in The FASEB Journal, Endostatin significantly reduced abnormal blood vessel growth within the eye in lab tests on mice. "With Baby Boomers reaching advanced ages, new treatments are desperately needed to keep age-related macular degeneration from becoming a national epidemic," Gerald Weissmann, MD, Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal told Science Daily.

With such potential treatments still a ways off, prevention is your best bet for now. In addition to regular eye exams, the Mayo Clinic recommends upping your intake of antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids, taking supplements, quitting smoking, wearing sunglasses to block UV rays, and even testing your own vision at home in between doctor visits.

Staying Young Secret of the Week

> February 1, 2008