VIDEO | These unknown maculopathies, still screening to find them
Prevention is essential to identify maculopathies, a subtle pathology that is difficult to diagnose and increasingly affects those over 60: on May 25th in Ancona there will be a screening day
ANCONA – A “sneaky, unnoticed” disease, but which increasingly affects people over 60. It is age-related macular degeneration, AMD, which is often only noticed when it’s too late. Prevention as well as information therefore becomes fundamental. And from this point of view, the national campaign “Your point of view matters. Don’t let maculopathy stop you“, promoted by Roche and sponsored by the Polytechnic University, will stop in Ancona next Saturday 25 May of the Marche, by the Apmo eye disease patients association, by the Macula Committee, by Retina Italia and the Italian Society of Ophthalmological Sciences.
As the rector Gian Luca Gregori underlines when presenting the initiative to the press this morning, “the theme is prevention and offering our community the chance to check their health status“. From this point of view, he continues, “research becomes fundamental. Applied research that bears fruit and also allows us to carry out health and welfare services”. And, he concludes, if “prevention is crucial”, so are the associations: “For personal reasons I discovered the importance of volunteering and only when you find yourself in certain situations do you understand the relevance of the third sector”, remarks the rector, giving appointment for Saturday 25 May from 10am to 1pm and from 2.30pm to 7pm at the Galleria Dorica. The screening, with the Oct exam, is aimed at the entire community with particular attention to the over 50s, given that approximately 10% of people between 65 and 74 and over 30% of the over 75s suffer from advanced AMD.
“We must try to arrive a little earlier, for the well-being of the patient and to avoid inappropriate treatments that burden the healthcare system”, highlights the general director of the University Hospital of the Marche Armando Marco Gozzini, while the dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery Mauro Silvestrini reiterates that “prevention is a great challenge for Medicine” and the director of the Department of Experimental and Clinical Medicine Mario Guerrieri underlines the importance of the initiative “from the point of from a healthcare perspective but also from a scientific-educational perspective”. The councilor for the University of the Municipality of Ancona Marco Battino also insists on prevention: it is in fact “the city’s responsibility – he highlights – to prevent and make the necessary tools available”.
Cesare Mariotti, director of the Ophthalmology Clinic of the Marche Aoum in Ancona, goes into more detail: maculopathies are “the most limiting pathology from the point of view of visual possibilityand the main ones are retinopathy diabetic disease, very widespread and the leading cause of blindness in the world, and age-related macular degeneration”. The screening, he continues, allows us to identify “the forms that we are capable of treating. Patients over 60 have a 25% incidence of age-related maculopathy, which are the initial and intermediate forms on which we are able to intervene “. These are forms, he continues, “genetically determined”, so “it is necessary to raise awareness of all people who have relatives affected by age-related spotted degeneration after the age of 60 to carry out an evaluation if there are signs initial or a full-blown disease”. To then intervene with innovative therapies such as injections of monoclonal antibodies of different origins. Saturday’s initiative, he concludes, “allows us to select patients, the disease cannot be cured but the complications are treatedand it means putting the patient in a position to lead a normal life, therefore reading, driving and watch TV.” Data in hand, the number of sick people will rise from 400,000 to 700,000 in 2050 and if they are treated late “the results are few or absent. Hence the idea of a screening for citizens to select those patients who will then be diverted to the eye clinic of ‘University of Ancona”.
A great help is given by the associations that have arisen in Italy. “The difficulties for patients are above all linked to access”, reports the executive director of Apmo Michele Allamprese, and “the main problem of medicine in this historical moment is linked to obtaining an eye examination, surgical treatment, an intravitreal injection. It’s difficult to get into the loop. And the reasons are much bigger than us.” Therefore, he continues, “the role of the association is to limit this damage and encourage virtuous paths. Our slogan is ‘avoid low vision, avoid blindness'”. The main activity therefore concerns screening, raising awareness, bringing information to people who are not yet ill or are in an early stage. “So that – he adds – an eye examination, a therapeutic activity in time avoids low vision and blindness. You can live long and well with well-treated eye diseases. We must do prevention and screening. And find the pathologies before they become serious “.
The president of the Macula Committee Massimo Ligustro is of the same opinion, who, himself a patient suffering from maculopathy, also asks for greater attention from Occupational Medicine. “Our association – he explains – aims to raise awareness among people about this silent and subtle disease, which gives no hints”.
Often the brain masks it which “compensates for our lack of video quality until we are around five tenths. So one eye has often been lost, because the disease has been alive for years, the other sees at five tenths but you don’t notice until it drops below five”. We need to change perspective, insists Ligustro, spread “the word ocular wellbeing” and “take care of the eye, our window on the world”. Unfortunately, he clarifies, “we only think about glass care, cataracts and glasses, but the glass is in a window, there is a frame, hinges and handle. This is the eye, you have to check the whole window “. So the advice is “check your eyes to live well”.