ARVO 2024: Assessing changes in intermediate AMD through structure to function studies

Giulia Corradetti, MD, outlines the important role that structure to function studies play in assessing and studying subtle changes in intermediate age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Corradetti highlights a recent study's findings on optical coherence tomography (OCT) structures features in intermediate AMD in her presentation at the annual Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology meeting in Seattle, Washington.

Video Transcript

Editor’s note - The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Giulia Corradetti, MD:

At ARVO, I was presenting a talk regarding the microparametric correlates of OCT features in intermediate AMD eyes. We actually found, in our study, that the changes in microperimetry are highly localized and dependent on the OCT features. For example, we found that precursors of atrophy like, for example, aurora has [been] described by the cam group, thin double layer sign and acquired vitelliform legions are associated with a decreased pointwise sensitivity. This is particularly important because structure to function studies offer a very important opportunity to assess and study subtle changes in intermediate AMD, prior the development of atrophy, and subsequently the permanent vision loss and could be leverage to facilitate and optimize the design of early intervention clinical trials. As we all know, there is an unmet medical need, which is the lack of treatments for early and intermediate AMD. In order to develop novel and early intervention clinical trials, we need to enhance our knowledge of the natural history of intermediate AMD. To do so, we need to study biomarkers that could be validated, have surrogate endpoints, and could [be] use in early intervention clinical trials to bring new treatments and develop new therapeutics to patients affected by early and intermediate AMD, prior that permanent loss of vision. This specific study I presented ARVO in Seattle is a pointwise sensitivity analysis, which implies the correlation of each single micro parametric stimulus to the corresponding OCT features. The next steps are to enlarge our cohort and expand this type of analysis in terms of pointwise sensitivity to a larger data, big data in order to assess and learn more about the natural history of earlier stages of the disease.