Aging & Health A to Z

Macular Degeneration

Causes & Symptoms

Certain risk factors increase your odds of developing ARMD.  Aging is the most significant risk factor. Other risk factors include:

• smoking
• heredity (you run an increased risk if you have or had a close family member with macular degeneration )
• fair skin.

Additional factors that may increase risks of ARMD include:

• high blood pressure
• abnormal cholesterol levels
• obesity
• too much sun exposure.

Symptoms of dry macular degeneration include:

• having blurry distance or reading vision, or both
• needing increasingly brighter light to see things that are near, such as a book you’re holding
• noticing that colors appear less bright than they used to
• difficulty seeing when moving from a brightly  lit area to a dimmer area, as when walking from outdoors into a dimly-lit room on a sunny afternoon
• seeing blank or blurry spots in your central field of vision
• having difficulty recognizing people’s faces.

Symptoms of wet macular degeneration include:

• distorted vision  (seeing, for example, straight lines that appear bent, or irregular)
• seeing dark or blank spots in your field of vision
• loss of central vision
• objects looks larger or smaller when viewed with one eye than the other
• colors are not as bright as they used to look, or don’t look the same when viewed separately with each eye.

Updated: March 2012
Posted:  March 2012