New hope for those with macular degeneration

KUSA – It’s as if his canvas has spots in it, blind spots right in the middle. Tom McMurdo has been teaching would-be painters for nearly 15 years now, but nature is pulling a dirty trick on him.

It’s the same disease that claims the vision of 400,000 more people every year - along the same magnitude of heart disease diagnoses.

It’s called macular degeneration and it links McMurdo, a painter, to 10 million people who already have the disease. (The truth about blindness)

One of those people he is linked to is using a new treatment that may give McMurdo some hope to keep painting for a long time to come.

When Bob Bodoin met a striking young woman named Betty more than 63 years ago, just one look in her eyes and he was a goner.

Now, after they’ve been married for more than six decades, he’s helping her fight macular degeneration.

Betty has the wet form of the disease, where fluid from leaky, abnormal blood vessels in the back of the eye, accumulates beneath her retina. It creates foggy, distorted vision since the retina, (the delicate tissue at the back of the eye), can’t lay flat.

It’s like using a film projector on a dramatically uneven screen.

Dr. Naresh Mandava, at the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Institute at the University of Colorado, compares wet macular degeneration to getting the film inside your camera wet - the film being similar to the vision forming surface at the back of the eye, the retina.

To learn more about the Rocky Mountain Lions Eye Institute, you can click here.

Mandava is treating Betty Bodoin with a new eye injection called Lucentis. Other medications are available, but Mandava says for some patients with wet macular degeneration, their vision improves 95 percent of the time with monthly injections. The drug migrates to the fluid bubbles beneath the retina and dries them up.

To learn more about Lucentis, you can click here.

If the notion of getting a shot in the eye gives one the heebie jeebies, Betty says you shouldn’t stress out about it.

“The injections don’t hurt at all! They put three or four drops in your eye, and then the needle goes in. It sounds much worse than it is,” she said.

The eye drops contain local anesthetic.

“Over the first week after her first injection she had a significant jump in vision. She’s done just fantastically and we’re just so happy for her,” said Mandava.

There aren’t as many options for other patients who have the dry form of the disease. That happens when blood flow stops to portions of the back of the eye and the retinal cells die. It’s equivalent to burning out your camera film with overexposure.

McMurdo’s doctor didn’t know about Lucentis yet, so now that the artist has learned about it, he says he’ll go back to his physician and ask more questions. He says he will also keep painting.

He’s already lost the vision in his right eye to a stroke several years ago and he vows to use his left eye to see the beauty he puts into his paintings for as long as he can.

To learn more about preventing blindness, you can click here.