Preserve, Protect, Prioritize: Advancing Treatment Strategies to Safeguard Vision in Geographic Atrophy
David Eichenbaum, MD, and Ferhina Ali, MD, MPH, discuss how the introduction of complement inhibitor therapies has transformed geographic atrophy management from a “come back in a year” conversation to active treatment discussions focused on slowing disease progression, with emphasis on early intervention, patient selection, and the evolving approaches to integrating these first-in-class treatments into clinical practice.
EP. 1: Clinical Variability in GA and the Role of Imaging in Diagnosis and Monitoring
July 30th 2025Panelists discuss how geographic atrophy (GA) presentations show clinical variability across patients while remaining consistently progressive, requiring a combination of imaging modalities including fundus photography, fundus autofluorescence, and OCT for diagnosis and monitoring, with OCT being most practical for routine clinical visits despite fundus autofluorescence serving as the gold standard for clinical trials.
EP. 2: Helping Patients Understand the Urgency of Early Action in Geographic Atrophy
July 30th 2025Panelists discuss how conversations with patients with geographic atrophy have evolved to emphasize the urgency of early intervention, with clinicians now able to offer hope through available treatments that can slow disease progression, while helping patients understand that their current vision represents the best they will ever have and leveraging family history awareness to motivate treatment consideration.
EP. 3: Evolving Approaches to GA Management in the Era of Complement Inhibitors
August 6th 2025Panelists discuss how their management approach for geographic atrophy (GA) has evolved from a “come back in a year” mentality to actively offering treatment discussions within 2 to 3 months, with most patients showing interest in complement inhibitor therapy, particularly those with functional vision remaining who understand the progressive nature of their disease and have vision left to preserve.
EP. 4: Choosing Between the Currently Available GA Therapies
August 6th 2025Panelists discuss how they approach therapy selection between the 2 FDA-approved geographic atrophy treatments by comparing pegcetacoplan’s potentially greater efficacy signals with avacincaptad pegol’s superior safety profile, with treatment choice often driven by individual patient factors such as motivation level, monocular status, and willingness to accept risk, while emphasizing that starting monthly dosing provides the best fallback position when patients experience treatment fatigue.
