The long term goal of this research is to develop noninvasive psychophysical tests which identify eyes at risk for exudative age- related maculopathy (ARM) and can evaluate the effectiveness of potential treatments for ARM. Exudative ARM is the leading cause of vision loss in the United States for people over 60 years of age. Spatiotemporal contrast sensitivity testing is the method explored here. There are three specific aims of the proposed work. 1. Experiments on young, healthy eyes will identify and quantify the effects of retinal illuminance and intra-ocular pressure (TOP) on spatiotemporal sensitivity. The results will provide parameterized normal with which to make comparisons with older healthy eyes. They will also be used to develop a descriptive model of spatiotemporal sensitivity in terms of luminance, spatial and temporal components. 2. Studies of healthy older eyes will determine whether illuminance controlled spatiotemporal sensitivity varies with age, as preliminary work suggests. The results will be used to evaluate the performance of patients with ARM. 3. Exploratory studies of the """"""""good"""""""" eye of patients with monocular exudative ARM will assess whether these at-risk eyes vision in spatiotemporal sensitivity from controls matched for age, retinal illuminance and IOP, as preliminary results suggest. The relationship between spatiotemporal sensitivity, clinical classifications and other psychophysical tests will also be explored. The model of spatiotemporal sensitivity developed in the first part will help to constrain the possible sites of any changes with age.
| Mayer, M J; van Kuijk, F J; Ward, B et al. (1998) Whole blood selenium in exudative age-related maculopathy. Acta Ophthalmol Scand 76:62-7 |
| Mayer, M J; Dougherty, R F; Hu, L T (1995) A covariance structure analysis of flicker sensitivity. Vision Res 35:1575-83 |
| Kim, C B; Mayer, M J (1994) Foveal flicker sensitivity in healthy aging eyes. II. Cross-sectional aging trends from 18 through 77 years of age. J Opt Soc Am A Opt Image Sci Vis 11:1958-69 |
| Mayer, M J; Spiegler, S J; Ward, B et al. (1992) Preliminary evaluation of flicker sensitivity as a predictive test for exudative age-related maculopathy. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 33:3150-5 |
| Mayer, M J; Spiegler, S J; Ward, B et al. (1992) Mid-frequency loss of foveal flicker sensitivity in early stages of age-related maculopathy. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 33:3136-42 |
| Mayer, M J; Spiegler, S J; Ward, B et al. (1992) Foveal flicker sensitivity discriminates ARM-risk from healthy eyes. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci 33:3143-9 |
