Prevention initiative on Saturday 25 May at the Galleria Dorica
A “sneaky, unnoticed” disease, but which increasingly affects people over 60. It is age-related macular degeneration, AMD, which we often only notice when it is too late. Prevention as well as information therefore becomes fundamental. And from this point of view, the national campaign “Your point of view matters” will stop in Ancona next Saturday 25 May. Don’t let maculopathy stop you”, promoted by Roche and sponsored by the Polytechnic University of Marche, the Apmo eye disease patients’ association, the Macula Committee, 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 possibility of checking their health”. From this point of view, he continues, “research becomes fundamental. An 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 a healthcare but also scientific-educational point of view”. 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”.
The director of the Aoum delle Marche eye clinic in Ancona, Cesare Mariotti, goes into more detail: maculopathies are “the most limiting pathology from the point of view of visual ability and the main ones are diabetic retinopathy, very widespread and the main cause of blindness in 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 macular degeneration after the age of 60 to carry out an evaluation whether there are initial signs 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 treated and it means enabling the patient to lead a normal life, therefore reading, driving and watching TV”. Data in hand, the number of sick people will rise from 400,000 to 700,000 in 2050 and if you 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 the 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 conditions. We must do prevention and screening. And find 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 insidious 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 the treatment of glass, cataracts and glasses, but the glass is in a window, there is a frame, hinges and a handle. This is the eye, you have to check the whole window”. So the advice is “check your eyes to live well”.
