Houston-area grandmother spares eyesight by knowing symptoms of common disease
HOUSTON - A local grandmother wants you to know the signs and symptoms of age-related macular degeneration. She was able to save her eyesight by being educated about it. She's sharing her important message during this Awareness Month for the prevalent disease.
Liz Rundzieher is a retired teacher who wants to stay healthy and keep her eyesight, especially because she helps her granddaughter with remote school every day.
"It's very important! I dusted off my credentials. I was a kindergarten teacher for 34 years and I feel honored to be able to pull out my credentials and help her and her virtual learning. It's a gift and if my vision had become impaired, and it could have, I wouldn't be able to do this. I also manage our personal business within our home, and I'm grateful that I can do all of that," says Liz.
Liz witnessed her aunts and uncles and mom lose their eyesight, having to count steps to make their way through their homes. They suffered from age-related macular degeneration or AMD. This is a chronic, progressive disease that eventually wipes-out the central field of vision and can lead to blindness. Because of her family history, Liz knew she was at risk and was "on the ready" to seek help.
"I, at that point, had regular eye exams and kept a graph on my refrigerator that I could eyeball regularly to see if those lines were wavy and so the day I saw the wavy lines, I knew it was time to go and I made an appointment quickly," explains Liz.
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Thankfully, Liz realized the early signs and her doctor, Retina Specialist Dr. Christina Weng from Baylor College of Medicine, wants to make sure you know them, as well.
"Sometimes you can have some waviness to your vision like when you're looking at a door frame it might kind of go off to the side, or when you're reading a line in your book, it might look wavy. Some people have a little bit of blurry vision when this disease at first starts, but like I mentioned, a lot of people have no symptoms at all. And so it's really critical, especially if you have a family history, and especially if you're over the age of 50 or 55, that you go see an eye specialist and have regular eye examinations. That's going to be really the best chance of catching this disease early. Age-related macular degeneration is a relatively common neurodegenerative disease that affects the back wall of the eye, a very special part of the eye that's helpful for our vision called the retina. There are basically two forms of macular degeneration. There's a dry form, which affects the majority of patients who have macular degeneration. In that form, there are deposits that form underneath this layer called the retina and a lot of times, patients are actually completely asymptomatic when they're in that stage in the wet form. However, you can have vessels that start growing abnormally underneath the retina that can cause leakage or even bleeding. Oftentimes, unfortunately, if it's untreated, it can lead to central vision loss," explains Dr. Weng.
Treatment for this condition have come a long way! Liz and her family are thankful her treatments are working.
"Dr. Weng recommended the injections that have worked wonderfully for me that preserve my vision and I'm extremely grateful," smiles Liz.
It might sound like a scary experience to get injections in the eye, but Liz is thankful for the treatment and for Dr. Weng, who administered it.
"Believe me, I was anxious when I found out my diagnosis and that I was getting an injection that very day, but her (Dr. Weng’s) own tenderness, her personal connection help to make it a less frightening experience. And she also has an assistant that they work beautifully as a team so that it's not a terrible process and I'm grateful.
"Even as early as twenty years ago, before we had these treatments, wet macular degeneration had a very dismal prognosis in terms of visual acuity in the patients' chance of keeping their vision, but that's completely reversed nowadays with the anti veg f injections that Mrs. Rundzieher is referring to," explains Dr. Weng.
It boils down to an early diagnosis and the right treatment to make seeing clearly with AMD a reality.
"This is really a very common disease that I diagnose every single day for patients in our clinics, and I can't stress enough the importance of regular eye examinations because that's going to really optimize your chances of detecting this disease very early, which will allow us to get you treated early on, and give you the best chance of hanging on to your vision for life," says Dr. Weng.
Dr. Weng says genetics plays a big role in who gets AMD, but she says a healthy diet and not smoking may help prevent it.
We were happy to work with the American Society for Retina Specialists on this story and thankful to them for sharing video for the story.
For more information about AMD and other retina conditions, to go to www.ASRS.org/Patients.