ARVO 2024: Functional microperimetric correlates of OCT structural features in AMD

At this year's ARVO meeting in Seattle, Washington, Giulia Corradetti, MD, gave a research presentation titled "Functional Microperimetric Correlates of OCT Structures Features in Intermediate Age-related Macular Degeneration." In a conversation with the Eye Care Network, Dr Corradetti, who is a research scientist at Doheny Eye Institute, explained the key findings from her work.

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Giulia Corradetti, MD: At ARVO, I was presenting a talk regarding the microparametric correlates of OCT features in intermediate AMD eyes. We actually found, in our study, that the changes in microperimetry are are highly localised and dependent on the OCT features. For example, we found that precursors of atrophy like, for example, aurora has [been] described by the cam group, thin double layer sign and acquired vitelliform legions are associated with a decreased pointwise sensitivity. This is particularly important because structure to function studies offer a very important opportunity to assess and study subtle changes in intermediate AMD, prior the development of atrophy, and subsequently the permanent vision loss and could be leverage to facilitate and optimise the design of early intervention clinical trials.

As we all know, there is an unmet medical need, which is the lack of treatments for early and intermediate AMD. In order to develop novel and early intervention clinical trials, we need to enhance our knowledge of the natural history of intermediate AMD. To do so, we need to study biomarkers that could be validated, have surrogate endpoints, and could [be] used in early intervention clinical trials to bring new treatments and develop new therapeutics to patients affected by early and intermediate AMD, prior that permanent loss of vision. This specific study I presented ARVO in Seattle is a pointwise sensitivity analysis, which implies the correlation of each single micro parametric stimulus to the corresponding OCT features. The next steps are to enlarge our cohort and expand this type of analysis in terms of pointwise sensitivity to a larger data, big data in order to assess and learn more about the natural history of earlier stages of the disease.