The 47th Macula Society meeting was held last month in sunny Palm Springs, California. Investigators present their latest works at this legendary scientific meeting, and one of the highlights of the meeting are the award lectures.
The Gragoudas award is bestowed upon the best original full length paper submitted by a retina fellow in a highly competitive application process. You can read about Ines Lains here, who received the award last year. The 2024 Gragoudas award recognized Giulia Corradetti, MD, of Doheny Eye Institute.
We caught up with Dr. Corradetti after the meeting.
How was your experience at Macula Society?
It has been a tremendous honor to receive the prestigious Evangelos Gragoudas Award and to be able to present my work at the Macula Society among the leaders and experts in the retina space worldwide. I am very grateful to my mentors, Dr. SriniVas Sadda, and Dr. David Sarraf for being exceptional mentors. I would like to thank the Macula Society Award Committee for awarding my research in AMD, and Dr. Gragoudas for his generosity. I am very happy to contribute with my research to the scientific progress in the AMD space, always putting patients first.
Can you tell us about your research?
There are no proven treatments for the early and intermediate stages of age-related macular degeneration (AMD). In order to develop new therapeutics targeting earlier stages of the disease and to develop early interventional clinical trials is pivotal to better understand the natural history of the disease.
For this purpose, we have explored the natural history of incomplete retinal pigment epithelial and outer retina atrophy (iRORA) by assessing the conversion of iRORA to complete retinal pigment epithelial and outer retina atrophy (cRORA). Our retrospective study studied the conversion of iRORA to cRORA in eyes with intermediate AMD (87 iRORA lesions) over 24 months.
We found that the majority of the iRORA lesions (93.1%) progressed to cRORA within 24 months. Additionally, we explored risk factors associated with a faster progression to late atrophic AMD stages. We found that iRORA lesions in eyes with the presence of hyperreflective foci (HRF) and extrafoveal iRORA lesions had a higher risk of progressing to cRORA within 24 months, with an OR of 7 (p = 0.01), and 6.5 (p = 0.03), respectively.
Further work is necessary to characterize early AMD lesions to optimize the design of early intervention clinical trials.
