Sir,
We would like to thank Drs Singh and Stewart for their interest and comments on our paper. We agree with them in that screening the whole population over a certain age for AMD would be a time consuming, expensive, and largely fruitless exercise. However, that was not the aim of our study.
We have evaluated the effectiveness of retinal screeners in judging the urgency of referral in patients referred with a suspicious macular lesion. In a population-based scenario, these would be patients referred to the general practitioners (GP) or hospital eye service by optometrists, either following a routine examination or with symptoms. These pictures could then be transmitted to the hospital via a telemedicine link and the urgency of referral determined by trained graders. These pictures would then be graded by ophthalmologists or trained graders as in our model, and not by GP as stated by Singh and Stewart.
It has been clearly established that a delay in treatment adversely affects the clinical outcome.1 We believe this technique offers significant advantages in decreasing the time from referral to treatment especially with the advent of new treatment modalities for AMD.
References
Oliver-Fernandez A, Bakal J, Segal S, Shah GK, Dugar A, Sharma S et al. Progression of visual loss and time between initial assessment and treatment of wet age-related macular degeneration. Can J Ophthalmol 2005; 40 (3): 313–319.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Jain, S. Screening for suspicious macular lesions using a telemedicine link. Eye 21, 302 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.eye.6702566
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/sj.eye.6702566