Scientists were reported to have developed a new way of detecting the age-related macular degeneration, which is one of the key causes of blindness worldwide.

In the initial use of standard clinical techniques, the detection of the disease was said to be impossible during its early stages, as doctors diagnosed AMD when little changes surfaced at the back of the patient’s eye.

However, a team at Queensland University of Technology, led by eye specialist Dr Beatrix Feigl, created the “dim light vision” test which, is said to be very sensitive to early changes in a person’s vision.

They stated that “We can detect subclinical visual impairment in healthy participants genetically at risk for AMD and in the future we hope this test might be utilized by ophthalmologists and optometrists, to identify patients with a high genetic risk of developing AMD but without any clinical signs of disease”.

Dr. Feigl expressed that genetics accounted for a part of the disease as well as lifestyle. Moreover, the team intends to carry out another phase of their research which will be a” longitudinal study, following up with people who took part in this study and who were shown to have early changes to their vision”.