Part 2: What if? Curing any eye disease with the snap of your finger

In celebration of Ophthalmology Times' 50th anniversary, we asked leading experts in the field, in a perfect world, if they had the ability to cure one eye disease or condition in the snap of their finger, what they would choose and why.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Sruthi Arepalli, MD:

So if I could wave a magic wand and cure any eye disease, it'd probably be pediatric uveitis. I see a lot of those patients, and you adopt them into your practice at the age of 2, 3, or 4, and you watch them grow up with this really somewhat blinding disease. So if we could get rid of that, get rid of their tons of surgery and interventions, and have them seeing perfectly. That's what I would choose.

Justis Ehlers, MD, FASRS:

Right now, dry macular degeneration, and the reason is, is that if you can cure that at an early stage, you also eliminate wet macular degeneration. It's one of those things that, right now, we don't have a lot of, for example, lifestyle modifications, things that you can do, for example, in diabetic retinopathy, which would have been my close second, that can really have major impacts on overall disease risk. It's one of those things where we don't have a lot of intervention to prevent end stage disease right now.

Roger A Goldberg, MD, MBA:

I think still, the holy grail would be able to be able to prevent intermediate AMD from progressing to the advanced stages, whether wet AMD or geographic atrophy. So we have therapies now for once patients develop those advanced stages of AMD, but I think we need to do better at stopping AMD before it causes advanced changes.

Nimesh Patel, MD:

Oh, that's an easy one for me. I also do some pediatric retina, and retinopathy of prematurity is one of the leading causes of childhood blindness in the US and definitely worldwide, and it's actually a fairly preventable disease. So I would like to cure that one, and we're working hard on trying to do that with improved research and protocols and global collaboration.