BACKGROUND Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a primary cause of blindness among the elderly in developed countries. The nature of AMD is complex and includes both environmental and hereditary factors. Oxidative stress is thought to be essential in AMD pathogenesis. Iron is suggested to be implicated in the pathogenesis of AMD through the catalysis of the production of reactive oxygen sp...

Evidence for an association between age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and obesity is inconsistent. The authors examined associations between adiposity and AMD prevalence using 21,287 participants from the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study aged 40-69 years at baseline (1990-1994). For men, each increase of 0.1 in waist/hip ratio (~1 standard deviation) was associated with a 13% increase ...

A quantitative proteomics analysis of the macular Bruch membrane/choroid complex was pursued for insights into the molecular mechanisms of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Protein in trephine samples from the macular region of 10 early/mid-stage dry AMD, six advanced dry AMD, eight wet AMD, and 25 normal control post-mortem eyes was analyzed by LC MS/MS iTRAQ (isobaric tags for relative ...

Purpose To develop and validate a risk score for AMD based on a simple self-administered questionnaire. Methods Risk factors having shown the most consistent associations with AMD were included in the STARS (Simplified Théa AMD Risk-Assessment Scale) questionnaire. Two studies were conducted, one in Italy (127 participating ophthalmologists) and one in France (80 participating ophthalmologist...

PURPOSE Common genetic variation in the complement component 1 inhibitor gene (SERPING1) was recently reported to increase the risk of developing age-related macular degeneration (AMD). This study was performed to replicate the association between SERPING1 and AMD. METHODS Seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) tagging common haplotypes across SERPING1 were genotyped on 786 (The Mayo Cl...

Amiodarone [2-butyl-3-(3',5'-diiodo-4'α-diethylaminoethoxybenzoyl)-benzofuran] (AMD), a class III antiarrhythmic drug, is known to cause idiosyncratic hepatotoxic reactions in human patients. One hypothesis for the etiology of idiosyncratic adverse drug reactions is that a concurrent inflammatory stress results in decreased threshold for drug toxicity. To explore this hypothesis in an animal mo...

AMD (age-related macular degeneration) is a progressive vision-threatening ocular disease, affecting central region of the retina--the macula--and manifesting in the elderly. AMD is a degenerative disease, and the degeneration affects primarily the retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells and secondarily the photoreceptors, leading consequently to disturbances or partial loss of central vision an...

PURPOSE To study the association of the single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs4073 in the interleukin-8 (IL-8) promoter region with the diagnosis and age of onset of exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in association with the known genetic risk factors for AMD and tobacco smoking. METHODS Medical records, smoking history and angiograms or fundus photographs of 301 patients with ...

Although the pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is unclear, genetic screening has revealed that polymorphisms in the complement system may be associated with AMD development. Production of autoantibodies was also found in AMD patients. In this study, we analyzed the antibody response in AMD patients. We found that purified B cells from AMD patients tended to respond to lower...

From the perspective of human nutrition, the prevention of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) through diet control is feasible and desirable. We investigated the relationship between serum antioxidants and AMD in the community-dwelling older Japanese eating a typical Japanese diet. In this study, 722 subjects aged 65 years or older (297 males and 425 females) who had gradable fundus photogr...