CIME 2024: Outlining the new standard of care in geographic atrophy

On May 4, 2024, eye care professionals gathered at the 18th Annual Controversies in Eye Care meeting in Los Angeles, California. During the meeting, Mary Beth Yackey, OD, Michael Javaheri, MD, and Christopher Riemann, MD, participated in an exciting panel that discussed care optimization and the modern treatment paradigm for patients with geographic atrophy. Here, Yackey and Javaheri share commentary on the panel.

Video transcript

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mary Beth Yackey, OD:

Hi, my name is Mary Beth Yackey. I'm an optometrist from the Cincinnati Eye Institute in the vitreoretinal team from Cincinnati, Ohio. Today I'm going to join my esteemed colleagues to bring to you the new discussions on our new standard of care for treating geographic atrophy. It's an exciting time and we're learning more and more about geographic atrophy as the days go by, and the treatments get broader. In 2023, we had exciting new standards of care, obviously, with 2 new drugs introduced. My job today is to bring to you and explain to you what geographic atrophy is and how it affects our patients lives on a daily and what we might be able to do to help them not only in the treatment standards, but also in helping them in their daily lifestyle to help their quality of life. I hope you'll learn from myself and my colleagues about this great topic, and I hope you can take it home to your practice to apply it to your patients in the daily life.

Micheal Javaheri, MD:

Hello, my name is Michael Javaheri. I'm a practicing retina specialist in Beverly Hills, California. My talk today focuses on multimodal imaging for geographic atrophy. By using multimodal imaging to identify geographic atrophy at its early stages, we can track its changes and also with concurrent treatments help monitor its progression. By doing this, we're able to better provide care for our patients in the long run. By using multimodal imaging, our optometry colleagues can help follow geographic atrophy and know when it happens. By knowing when it happens, they can refer patients for care in a prompt manner.

Yackey:

So for optometrists, we want you to be looking at the patient with new eyes, looking for geographic atrophy. For so many years, we could not do anything for geographic atrophy. Treatment was definitely not on our forefront and we would just tell our patients, you know, go get some low vision aids and come back and see me in a year. Now we want to tighten those followups and offer them the opportunity to have treatment if a retina physician near you is treating, or at least given the opportunity to seek further ideas from a retina specialist.

Javaheri:

Our take home message is that using multimodal imaging, fundus photography autofluorescence, and OCT all together is the best way to help early changes with regard to geographic atrophy.

Yackey:

Thank you for having me today, and it's a pleasure to be here.