If you have age-related macular degeneration ask your doctor for EXACT PROTOCOLS that prevent CVD and stroke.
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AMD(age-related macular degeneration) Strongly Associated With Heart Disease and Stroke
Subretinal drusenoid deposits found in 85% of patients with AMD and CVD in small study
Subretinal drusenoid deposits (SDD) had a significant association with underlying cardiovascular disease (CVD), adding a missing link between age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and CVD, according to a prospective study presented at the American Society of Retina Specialists (ASRS) meeting.
In this exclusive video, study author R. Theodore Smith, MD, PhD, of Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, discusses the study and the clinical implications.
The following is a transcript of his remarks:
A connection between these three diseases [SDD, AMD, and CVD] has been suspected for decades, but it's never been pinned down. The way we approached the problem was to look at AMD as two separate diseases -- one involving the classic drusen pathways and the other one involving what we call the subretinal drusenoid deposits. And drusen are under the RPE [retinal pigment epithelium], and the subretinal deposits are above the RPE, and they're very different. They're very different genetics, lipid content, risk factors, and so on.
So we chose to segregate a group of 200 AMD patients into 100 approximately with, and another 100 without, the subretinal deposits. And then we looked at their cardiovascular history. And we were pleasantly surprised and almost shocked to find that of the 200 patients, there were 47 in that entire group that had serious cardiovascular disease -- such as cardiac infarction, a severe valvular disease, compromising circulation, or the stroke patients who had significant stenosis of their internal carotid artery, and this blocks the circulation to the eye.
So all these things in common have is that the perfusion eventually getting to the eye is insufficient. Out of these 47 subjects with these severe conditions, 40 out of the 47 showed subretinal deposits in their eyes, and only seven did not. And when we do the odds ratios, the odds of a patient having high-risk vascular disease, given the presence of these deposits in their eyes, is basically 9 to 1, with a very nice confidence interval from like 4 to 15.
So you put these together, we can detect ongoing -- not future, but present -- severe vascular disease in patients with a simple OCT [optical coherence tomography] scan, which is very simply done in our ophthalmology clinics. And we add that to some severe risk factors like HDL [high-density lipoprotein] and so forth, we can even do it more accurately. This promises to change everything.
In clinical practice, once all this has been formulated and codified, it is possible that we could have these fairly inexpensive retinal cameras available through[out] the medical world so that patients can be screened by them as part of their routine medical care. And then they could be told immediately whether or not they have these high-risk features, which means they should then have further workup -- let's say an echocardiogram, carotid Doppler -- and then take it to the next level to find out what may be hiding. But as a screening tool, that's where we really like to take it.
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