Age-related macular degeneration or AMD is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly in the developed world.

AMD is a form of macular disease that affects the eye's central retina and afflicts millions of people (30 percent of them over 75 years old) in the United States alone.

It is associated with defects of retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPE), the failure of which leads to progressive loss of vision.

Despite the potentially devastating impact on patients' quality of life, no successful therapy to stop or reverse the progression of AMD is available in the majority of cases.

Formation of microscopic plaques called "drusen" in the eye is an early sign and presumed the trigger of AMD. The mechanism by which this plaque-like drusen form and what it does is not yet fully understood.

Now, scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) and the Galveston-based spinoff Neurobiotex, Inc. found that drusen in the eyes of those with AMD has high levels of Zinc.

The fact that Zinc has been shown to contribute to the formation of brain plaques in Alzheimer's disease patients, made these scientist look at the Zinc in AMD plaques.

According to Erik van Kuijk, UTMB ophthalmologist and senior author of the study:

"Generally, zinc is essential to keeping a molecule's shape, but mobilized zinc can cause lots of problems. However, since it is a small proportion of the overall zinc pool, it's straightforward to target it.

That's what researchers are beginning to do with Alzheimer's disease by developing methodologies and drugs that can capture this mobilized zinc and see if doing that slows down the degenerative process. This study shows that we could now potentially take a similar route for AMD treatment."

Find more details from the full report.