Many AMD supplements do not meet AREDS or AREDS2 standards
A study recently published in Ophthalmology found that nutritional supplements marketed to help treat age-related macular degeneration (AMD) may not be backed by scientific evidence.
San Francisco-A study
According to the study, researchers examined the five top-selling brands of ocular nutritional supplements in the United States according to dollar sales tracked by SymphonyIRI (Waltham, MA) from June 2011 to June 2012. The study reviewed the ingredients and manufacturer claims of 11 ocular nutritional supplements on the companies' consumer information websites. Those ingredients were compared with those contained in the
The researchers determined that some of the top-selling products do not contain identical ingredient dosages to eye vitamin formulas proven effective in clinical trials.
“All of the ocular nutritional supplements contained the ingredients from the AREDS or AREDS2 formula; 36 percent (4/11) of the supplements contained equivalent doses of AREDS or AREDS2 ingredients; 55 percent (6/11) included some information about the AREDS on their consumer information websites,” the study’s authors write.
“Product descriptions from four of the 11 supplements (36 percent) stated that the supplements were important to maintain general eye health; none of these supplements duplicated the AREDS or AREDS2 formula. All the individual supplements claimed to ‘support,’ ‘protect,’ ‘help,’ or ‘promote’ vision and eye health, but none specified that there is no proven benefit in using nutritional supplements for primary prevention of eye disease.”
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