Tuesday 9 August 2022 12:40 AM New jab could give hope to thousands at risk of sight loss trends now

Every six weeks, former company secretary Margaret Mason feels a sense of dread as she prepares to go to hospital for an injection into her eyeball.

She finds the experience not only nerve-racking but painful — yet it is something she must do to preserve her failing sight.

‘I absolutely dread it,’ says Margaret, 71, who lives with her husband John, 70, in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan. 

‘Having a needle in your eyeball is not pleasant, but I go as I don’t want to go blind,’ she says.

But soon, she and hundreds of thousands of others may be spared this ordeal thanks to a newly approved treatment.

Margaret has age-related macular degeneration (AMD), one of the leading causes of sight loss in this country.

It’s a common complaint, affecting some 600,000 people in the UK, and occurs as a result of damage to the macula, the middle part of the retina, the thin layer of tissue at the back of the eye that turns light into signals for the brain.

There are two forms of AMD — dry and wet. Dry is the early stage, when the macula, which processes sharp central vision, begins to degenerate causing vision problems. In five to seven per cent of cases this will progress to wet AMD, when new fragile blood vessels form in the eye to try to repair the damage to the macula, but start to leak.

‘With age, there’s a degeneration in the macula and this leads to a build-up of by-products causing little areas of thickening,’ says Professor Ian Pearce, a consultant ophthalmologist at Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

‘This accumulates in the back of the eye, which can lead to blurred vision or a blind spot. This is when prompt treatment is needed. As a general rule, time from suspected diagnosis to treatment is within two weeks. If you don’t treat it that fast, you can end up with permanent damage.’

The treatment for wet AMD is regular injections, every four to eight weeks, of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF), which stops the abnormal growth of tiny blood vessels that can destroy the retina.

The drugs, such as ranibizumab (brand name Lucentis), contain an antibody that stops chemical signals that prompt the blood vessels to

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