You lose your central vision, so you really can't see in front of you, you can't read properly, you can't drive, you can't watch TV. The worst-case scenario is that you end up legally blind.
You have to have a trigger that gets this thing into motion. We don't know specific triggers at this point. That's one of the things that we have to figure out.
In just a few short years, we've gone from knowing very little about what causes AMD to knowing quite a lot. We now have clear targets for early therapeutic intervention.
I am not aware of any other complex disorder where nearly 75 percent of genetic causality has been identified.
These findings are significant because they absolutely confirm the roles of these two genes and, consequently, the central role of a specific immune response pathway, in the development of AMD.