Active clinical trials for "Geographic Atrophy"

To investigate pathomorphological and functional variations of choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in a Chinese population using optical coherence tomography (OCT) to find which kinds of Fundus characteristics indicated exudative AMD.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the most prevalent cause of vision loss in developed countries and is often discussed in terms of the "dry" and the "wet" forms. The "wet" form of AMD is the more advanced form of the disease and is responsible for 80% of the legal blindness in AMD. Treatment options include a promising class of biologics called anti-vascular endothelial growth factors, as well as photodynamic therapy and laser surgery. These therapies can slow further vision loss, but cannot achieve recovery of lost vision. The "wet" form of AMD is always preceded by the "dry" form. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that the early detection and treatment of the "dry" form may help reduce vision loss or progression to the more damaging "wet" form. Unfortunately, symptoms appear only in advanced stages of the "dry" form. As light sensitive cells in the macula breakdown in a process called geographic atrophy, the patient may notice blurred central vision. OCT is an imaging technology that can perform non-contact cross-sectional imaging of retinal and choroidal tissue structure in real time. It is analogous to ultrasound B-mode imaging, except that OCT measures the intensity of reflected light rather than acoustical waves. This study aims is to use OCT technology to compare how the retinal anatomy and blood flow differ within three severity groupings of non-exudative age-related macular degeneration (NEAMD).

The objective of this study is to compare Cirrus HD-OCT automated measurements of the illumination area under the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) to expert manual measurements of areas of hypofluorescence typical of geographic atrophy in fundus autofluorescence (FAF) images.

To conduct a precision study to assess the microperimetry function of the Spectral OCT/SLO. The study will assess variability across measurements taken by three different operator-device configuration across clinical sites, variability between subjects within a given operator-device configuration, and variability within a subject for a single operator-device configuration.

The goal for this study is to initiate a randomized, controlled clinical trial to test the viability of personalized AMD progression prediction models. Early and intermediate AMD patients will be recruited and randomly assigned them to a control or test group. The test group will include patients who will receive personalized follow-up care based on their predicted risk, and collect baseline and follow-up data. This work will advance the AMD field by improving the identification of high-risk patients as candidates for more frequent screening and earlier treatment, leading to better clinical outcomes.

Given the aging population who will be affected by wet AMD and lack of effective GA treatment, it is crucial to assess the safety profile of repeated ranibizumab injections in AMD patients with GA, particularly the possible risk of GA development and enlargement. This potential adverse effect has significant implication in the discussions with patients regarding the risks and benefits of AMD treatment and injection frequency. While monthly injections provide slight improvement of visual acuity at 2 years (Martin et al., 2012), the risk of GA enlargement may offset this benefit in visual acuity. Previous studies assessed the association between intravitreal ranibizumab injections and de novo GA development in injection-naïve eyes (Martin et al, 2012, Querques et al., 2012., Grunwald et al., 2014), rather than GA enlargement in patients with preexisting GA. To the best of the investigators knowledge, there has been no prospective study assessing the association between intravitreal ranibizumab injections and rate of GA progression in patients with pre-existing GA. There is also no prospective study comparing the morphological features of GA between patients who are receiving intravitreal injections and those who are not, nor the concordance of GA enlargement rate between the 2 eyes among patients receiving and not receiving treatment.