Not seeing well is something that goes far beyond an eye disorder. The impact of a not perfectly efficient sight is enormous because it limits the activities of daily life, to all ages. People who suffer from maculopathy, a chronic eye disease, increasingly widespread especially in the population over 60, are well aware of this: every year in Italy 20,000 people get sick only of age-related degenerative maculopathy, which is one of the main causes of low vision and of blindness.
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Depression and stress
The first consequences of a visual deficit are those related to mobility and loss of autonomy, but then the emotional ones arrive. “Higher rates of depression, emotional distress and cognitive dysfunction are associated with loss of central vision, just as visual impairment has been associated with greater morbidity, including a doubling of the risk of falls and a four to eight-fold increase in hip fracture risk, a two-fold decrease in autonomy and an early admission, on average of three years, to residential care “, explained Giuseppe Lo Giudice, councilor of the Italian Association of Ophthalmologists in the context of the XII National Congress of Aimo. “It has also been shown that vision loss associated with maculopathy – continued Lo Giudice – has a negative impact on patients’ ability to take care of themselves and other people in their care. These handicaps, of course, are even more disabling when considered on patients in full working and social activity, as it can be in the case of diabetic patients suffering from retinopathy ”.
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What are maculopathies
Maculopathies are a set of pathologies that mainly and exclusively affect the central portion of the retina called the macula. This portion represents the most ‘noble’ part of the retinal tissue, being the seat of millions of cells responsible for the reception of the visual stimulus and its processing. “The pathologies affecting the macula therefore represent a potential cause of important and sometimes irreversible loss of vision – explained Lo Giudice – as it occurs in the course of age-related macular degeneration or severe diabetic maculopathy”.
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How they are treated
The therapies most commonly implemented to date to counter this loss are all focused on the possibility of counteracting the vascular growth factor, the main cause of exudative and hemorrhagic complications. “Obviously, this therapeutic possibility, mainly focused on counteracting the decline in visual capacity and contributing to its stabilization – explained the director of Aimo – is of primary importance when compared to pathologies that profoundly alter the ability to perform normal actions. daily “. The therapeutic possibility, however, must necessarily be considered in the appropriate care context – underlined Lo Giudice – with the structures and organizational skills capable of carrying out the best possible care of the patient, from diagnosis to therapy “.
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The importance of organized assistance
But unfortunately this does not always happen, resulting in a delay in therapy and inadequate treatment for a type of pathology with which the patient will have to live for his entire life. In this context, for the expert it appears “essential to put in place all the ‘paraphernalia’ to try to face the challenge that is proposed to us in the best possible way”. Therefore, cutting-edge therapeutic possibilities, new effective drugs in the short-term, adequate medical and nursing staff committed to the clinical management of the patient, appropriate spaces and structures capable of providing the best reference support, all of this “is realized through awareness that what has been done so far is still not enough to counter the spread of maculopathy. The great challenge for us ophthalmologists must not be represented exclusively by the continuous search for cutting-edge drugs, then, but must necessarily pass through the intrinsic capacity of being able to provide the best possible care in terms of therapy and therapy support, an indispensable means to be able to implement and counter the spread of damage induced by maculopathy ”, concluded Lo Giudice.
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