This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Usha Chakravarthy, FRCS, PhD
Queen's University of Belfast Belfast, Northern Ireland

JAMA. 1997;278(4):288.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—I read with dismay the Medical News & Perspectives article on radiation therapy for wet-type macular degeneration by Mr Skolnick.¹

First, the article showed a complete disregard for the first comprehensively documented phase 1 and 2 trials carried out on this subject. This work initially was reported in 1990,² and the long-term follow-up on the same patient group was published in 1996.³

Second, the claims of visual stabilization and improvement in patients with wet, age-related macular degeneration following external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) as reported by Skolnick are meaningless as they are based entirely on short-term data with no attempt to distinguish between the classic and occult forms of this disease.

My own data searches have revealed that since our initial report² more than 850 patients have been treated with EBRT worldwide. The baseline visual characteristics of these patients vary markedly within and between centers, with . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?