By Sydney M Crago
Katherine Talcott, a retina specialist at Cole Eye Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, presented at the Retinal World Congress 2025 meeting. In her presentation and in her conversation with Modern Retina, Talcott discussed the connection between autoimmune diseases and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), emphasizing the role of inflammation in AMD development.
The following conversation has been edited lightly for clarity.
Modern Retina: Can you share a bit about this study looking at the connection between autoimmune diseases and age-related macular degeneration?
Katherine Talcott, MD: Here at Retina World Congress, I’m presenting on is looking at the connection between autoimmune diseases and age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and we know that inflammation plays a role in the development of AMD, and especially with the approval of complement inhibitors for geographic atrophy (GA), we wondered if we could explore this connection a little bit. One of the things that we looked at is that, we actually did a large database study, to be able to look at the connection of patients who have autoimmune problems in AMD, and we actually found that for most autoimmune diseases, they have an increased risk of AMD compared to those people who don’t. So we specifically, then, created sort of cohorts of patients, who had autoimmune diseases to see if they’re more likely to present with AMD, including at different stages. And we actually found that this was the case for almost all the autoimmune diseases that we looked at. And so, this was really a hypothesis-generating study that we did to explore this connection, but it raised almost more questions for us, which is, you know, are patients with autoimmune diseases, do they present with AMD at an earlier age? Do people who have more active autoimmune disease, do they have a more advanced form of AMD? So one of the things that we’ll be sort of doing next is looking at, do patients with these diseases present with AMD at an earlier age? Can we look at this in our own database of our patients at Cleveland Clinic, and do they present with a different flavor of AMD than most people? So it’s just interesting to, we think about inflammation related to aging, inflammaging, and so that just explored that relationship in our study.
Read more: Q&A: Katherine Talcott, MD, on exploring a potential connection between autoimmune diseases and AMD
Source: Modern Retina- Ophthalmology