Original articleVision-related quality of life in patients with bilateral severe age-related macular degeneration
Section snippets
Materials and methods
All patients with bilateral severe neovascular AMD scheduled to undergo MT360 at Duke University Eye Center from February 1999 through August 2002 who met eligibility criteria, as outlined in Table 1, were invited to participate in the institutional review board–approved study.21, 22 Data recorded at the initial interview included patient age, patient gender, and duration of central vision loss in the second affected eye, which was calculated from patients' reports of when they could no longer
Results
Seventy patients, of whom 27 (38.6%) were male, were enrolled in the study. The mean age of the patients was 76.4 years (standard deviation [SD], 5.65). Patients had had vision loss in their second eye for an average of 13.5 weeks (SD, 11.2) before presentation. The mean lesion size in the most recently affected eye was 10.0 MPS disc areas (SD, 5.5), and all lesions were ≥3 MPS disc areas in size. The mean distance VA was 62.4 letters (SD, 16.7), mean near VA was 0.81 logMAR (SD, 0.37), and
Discussion
Patients in this study tended to have NEI VFQ-25 QOL scores similar to those of patients with low vision, but worse scores than patients with AMD of varying severity and a reference group without ocular disease.18 However, some quality of vision and vision-specific NEI VFQ-25 subscales seemed to be better descriptors than others of the problems patients with bilateral severe AMD face when performing normal vision-related daily activities. The correlation between visual function and most NEI
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge the help provided by William Smiddy and William Feuer in reanalyzing data from a previous study to generate SF-36 composite scores used in the low-vision comparison group in this study.
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Manuscript no. 230648.
Financial support: National Eye Institute (Bethesda, Maryland) Clinical Vision Research Development Award (grant no.: EY11725) (SSS) and D. Euan Baird, Angelica H. Baird, and the Andrew Family Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts (CAT).