Purpose
To investigate the risk characteristics of the combined geographic atrophy (GA) and choroidal neovascularization (CNV) phenotype of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) compared to GA or CNV.
Methods
Patients with advanced AMD were retrospectively identified and divided into 2 groups using multimodal imaging (Fig1): patients with GA or CNV and patients with simultaneous GA and CNV in at least one eye. Epidemiologic and clinical factors were gathered from patients’ questionnaires. Genotypes for age-related maculopathy susceptibility 2 (ARMS2) and complement factor H (CFH) were determined.
Results
42 patients with GA or CNV and 16 patients with combined GA/CNV were identified. Patients with the combined phenotype were older (86.4 vs. 81.8 years, p=0.049) and had a higher prevalence of advanced AMD in the fellow eye (81.3% vs. 31.0%, p<0.001). The frequencies of the risk allele (C) for CFH (0.52 vs 0.66, p=0.20) and the risk allele (T) for ARMS2 (0.45 vs 0.41, p=0.65) were not significantly different between the 2 groups (Table 1).
Conclusions
The combined GA/CNV phenotype shares similar epidemiologic, clinical, and genetic features with GA and CNV but occurs at an older age and is more associated with advanced AMD in the fellow eye, suggesting that all these phenotypes are part of the same spectrum of disease and that the combined phenotype represents an even more advanced form of AMD than GA and CNV.
Keywords: 412 age-related macular degeneration •
609 neovascularization