The disease comes without a warning–without a known cure–stealing your sight and your independence.
It’s called age-related macular degeneration, which affects your central vision and is the leading cause of irreversible blindness among the elderly.
A Largo, Fla., clinic now claims an experimental blood-filtering treatment can improve vision dimmed by age-related macular degeneration, which severely impairs the vision of nearly 2 million Americans and affects 10 million more, numbers sure to grow as the Baby Boomers age.
Critics, namely ophthalmologists, say the treatment hasn’t been scientifically tested in the United States. It’s also costly, as much as $20,000 for the initial treatments, and targets vulnerable people desperate over fading sight.
“We may not be able to do much about macular degeneration, but we can save the elderly from losing their life’s savings on this,” said Dr. Philip Rosenfeld, assistant professor of ophthalmology at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami.
The disease’s drastic effect makes its victims vulnerable and the frantic search for help understandable. Age-related macular degeneration, or AMD, damages the central area of the retina, the macula, which is responsible for your central vision. Without that, it’s difficult to perform everyday tasks such as reading and driving — even recognizing faces.
The most common form, “dry,” is marked by pigment changes, atrophy or yellow deposits, known as drusen, in the retina. Though less common, the wet form usually causes more severe vision loss. In this form, fluid and blood leak from newly formed, abnormal blood vessels. The leakage causes scars and results in poor vision in the macula’s center.
So far, doctors can do little or nothing to stop AMD’s progressive, blinding march. The dry form of AMD is essentially untreatable. The only proven treatment for the wet form is laser. Even that is effective in only about 7 or 8 percent of the cases.
In August, an emergency room physician, Dr. Richard Davis, opened the Largo center, offering a blood-filtering treatment called RheoTherapy. He plans to open another between Miami and Boca Raton by this year’s end.
The process, now being used in Germany, is similar to donating blood. The patient reclines while blood is removed, filtered of “toxic proteins,” according to promotional materials, then reintroduced into the body. The process takes about two to three hours and costs between $1,500 and $2,000 for each treatment. As many as 10 treatments spread over two to three months are recommended, then one or two “booster sessions” a year are suggested.
Because the treatment is experimental, it’s not covered by Medicare, Medicaid or private insurance.
Among the center’s patients is retired military man Andy Chriss, 79, diagnosed four years ago with the wet form in his right eye. He had laser treatment, which he doesn’t think helped. Then, in the last year, his vision worsened.
Chriss, 79, who lives near Tarpon Springs, Fla., is one of 17 patients receiving free treatments as part of a clinic study. He says his vision has improved with the seven treatments he has had, and he can read the newspaper without a magnifying glass.
“I was desperate,” Chriss said. “If you’re losing vision in one eye as fast as I was, you’d be desperate too.”
Many ophthalmologists remain skeptical and cautious.
“They haven’t identified a specific toxin they’re removing,” said Dr. Peter Reed Pavan, an ophthalmologist at the University of South Florida College of Medicine Eye Institute. “Toxic protein? That’s something unknown to me.”
Because the treatment hasn’t gone through rigorous clinical trials in the United States, he also cautions that treatments could worsen the condition.
“Until something has been tested and proven, you don’t know that it won’t harm,” he said. Controlled studies are vital because they involve a placebo group, people who aren’t given the treatment that’s being tested. “Anecdotal stories are just that,” Rosenfeld said. “They’re stories.”
“RheoTherapy has never been shown in a controlled trial to provide any benefit to any patient,” he said. “It’s unproven, and it’s inappropriate to measure the benefit of a treatment by subjective means — asking a patient if he feels better. Patients are so desperate they’ll believe that anything helps because they want to believe it.”
The RheoTherapy clinic does have a study planned at University of Utah, testing a new filtering system on patients, Davis, RheoTherapy’s president, noted. Results will take months to evaluate and years to determine any long-term effect.
