The incidence of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of vision loss in people over the age of 50 — a result of damage to the center of the retina — has decreased in the last 15 years. A new study published in the Archives of Ophthalmology used data from the 2005 to 2008 NHANES database and looked at high-resolution pictures of the eyes of 5,533 U.S. adults over the age of 40. Researchers found that 6.5 percent of study participants had evidence of some form of AMD, which is down from 9.4 percent of people in the same age group found to have AMD in the 1988 to 1994 NHANES analysis. That translates to an overall reduction of more than 30 percent. Rates of the eye malady are known to increase with age and are also less common among blacks aged 60 and older than among same-aged whites.
Although the reason for the decline is poorly understood, researchers believe that smoking, high blood pressure and poor diet and exercise are risk factors. “There’s no doubt that smoking is one of the definite risk factors for this devastating condition, and the fall in the cases of AMD may be at least partially attributed to the concurrent decline in smoking rates during the same time period,” says ACSH's Dr. Elizabeth Whelan.