Many Patients With Wet AMD Are Lost to Follow-Up - Medpage Today

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The number of patients with wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) who fail to show up for follow-up appointments is higher than expected. Factors such as age, race/ethnicity, and insurance type increased the risk for loss to follow-up among patients with neovascular AMD, according to a study presented at the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) annual meeting.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, presenting author Rahul N. Khurana, MD, an ophthalmologist at Northern California Retina Vitreous Associates, discusses the study.

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

I presented some exciting research on loss to follow-up in patients with neovascular AMD. We know that anti-VEGF therapy is very effective, but there's concerns that many patients aren't compliant and aren't following up.

In our study, we looked at a national registry, the IRIS registry from the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and looked at over 160,000 patients who were treatment-naive, who subsequently got treated with anti-VEGF therapy from 2013 to 2015 and then followed them over the next 4 years. We then looked at patients who were treated and who did not follow up within 12 months.

And what we found was that nearly one in nine patients were lost to follow-up. More concerning, we even found certain high-risk characteristics. We found that advancing age, patients older than age 75, male patients, patients who are African American or Latino, were at higher risk of being lost to follow-up. We also found out that patients who had unilateral disease and who had Medicaid insurance were at higher rates of loss to follow-up.

This is concerning because when we know when care is interrupted, patients are at risk for irreversible vision loss. And what we need to do as a community is to help identify these patients and help improve adherence by figuring out new ways to empower and educate our patients to continue on therapy.

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  Greg Laub is the Senior Director of Video and currently leads the video and podcast production teams. Follow

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