MedWire News: The progressive eye disease age-related macular degeneration (AMD) doubles the risk for death due to cardiovascular disease, reveals a study from Australia.

Paul Mitchell and colleagues from University of Sydney in New South Wales say their findings provide further evidence of an association between AMD and vascular disease, which could have important implications regarding novel anti-angiogenic therapies for AMD.

The researchers studied 3654 participants of the Blue Mountains Eye Study (BMES) who were aged 49 years or older at the start of the study, between 1992 and 1994.

Among those participants younger than 75 years at the beginning of the study, early-stage AMD at baseline independently predicted cardiovascular mortality over the next decade compared with no AMD, at a relative risk (RR) of 2.32, after taking into account traditional cardiovascular risk factors.

Meanwhile, late-stage AMD at baseline was independently associated with a more than five-fold higher cardiovascular mortality in the following decade in this age group (RR=5.57).

Furthermore, late AMD was associated with 10-fold higher stroke mortality (RR=10.21), although the authors note that this was based on a relatively small number of cases.

"These associations were not found for all ages combined or for persons aged over 75 years," Mitchell and co-authors report in the British Journal of Opthalmology.

The authors comment: "With the increasing availability of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) therapy, which some reports suggest may increase cardiovascular risk, our results suggest that individuals with a high cardiovascular risk profile may potentially need to be monitored closely if receiving anti-VEGF therapy."

They conclude: "Our BMES data provide support for a possible link between AMD and subsequent stroke and cardiovascular events. The potential association between AMD and vascular disease, and mechanisms underlying this relationship, deserve further study."

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