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The following is a summary of “A Novel AMD Severity Scoring System Leveraging the AREDS Studies and Routine Clinical Electronic Medical Records,” published in the April 2025 issue of Ophthalmology by Lee et al. 

Researchers conducted a retrospective study to create a novel severity scoring system for age-related macular degeneration (AMD) that separately quantified exudative and non-exudative forms using routinely collected electronic medical record (EMR) data.  

They used data from the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS), AREDS2, and the Eye Adult Changes in Thought study (Eye ACT) for external validation. Severity score models for non-exudative (“dry”) AMD (AMD-D) and exudative (“wet”) AMD (AMD-W) were developed through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on data from AREDS and AREDS2. These models were applied to the Eye ACT cohort, where longitudinal ophthalmic clinical data were extracted from an EMR capturing routine care using natural language processing-based text mining algorithms. The main outcome measures included the trajectories of AMD-D and AMD-W scores in the Eye ACT cohort and their relationship with age and the onset of the first anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (antiVEGF) treatment.  

The results showed a moderately positive correlation between AMD-D and AMD-W scores in the Eye ACT cohort (Pearson 0.702, 95% CI: 0.699-0.704). In 4,412 eyes from 2,248 participants who never received antiVEGF treatment, AMD-D scores increased slightly before age 80 and showed a steeper rise through age 90. Of the 220 eyes from 171 participants who received antiVEGF, most exhibited a pattern of gradually increasing AMD-W scores in the weeks or months prior to receiving antiVEGF treatment.  

Investigators concluded that the CFA-based scoring system facilitated detailed assessments of both non-exudative and exudative AMD severity using routinely collected clinical features with missing data in situations where standard AREDS scoring was not feasible. 

Source: aaojournal.org/article/S0161-6420(25)00276-3/abstract