MacuLogix Hosts Inaugural AMD Speaker Alliance

MacuLogix hosted the industry’s first AMD Speaker Alliance meeting. The peer-to-peer event was attended by 25 optometric key opinion leaders who are at the front lines of minimizing vision loss due to AMD and other retinal disease.

“This meeting is helping us kick off a movement in our profession because, in reality, the fight against AMD has barely begun,” attendee Jeffry Gerson, OD, said in a company news release. “AMD is at least three times more common than glaucoma, yet how many practices can say that their charts reflect this fact? This is a problem with dire consequences.”

Indeed, a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology revealed that both optometrists and ophthalmologists are missing AMD about 25% of the time.¹ Also quite concerning is that 30% of the undiagnosed eyes in the study had large drusen. ¹

“Failure to diagnose is clearly a problem,” adds Paul Karpecki, OD. A staggering 78% of patients are first diagnosed with AMD having already suffered irreversible vision loss, and nearly half of them are first diagnosed with an acuity of 20/200 or worse.^2,3 “As a profession, we need to step up education and help our colleagues improve these statistics.”  

During the 2-day event, the AMD Speaker Alliance attendees discussed strategies and training methods that can help make AMD education meaningful and relevant in real life clinical practice. In 2019, these doctors plan to share their own best practices and help spread the word that optometric education should neither ignore AMD nor should it focus too heavily on end-stage treatments. Instead, optometric educators can make a difference by showing their peers how to detect disease sooner so that less invasive treatments can be initiated and patients can be more carefully monitored to prevent or delay devastating outcomes.

“MacuLogix recognizes the great opportunity for progress in terms of improving AMD outcomes and is committed to doing everything possible to achieve our vision of eliminating blindness caused by AMD,” Amanda K. Lee, OD, Director of Professional Relations, MacuLogix, said in a company news release. “The meeting was tremendously useful because it allowed many of the profession’s most prominent speakers to learn from one another and work together to map out the road to a better, healthier future.”