Macular degeneration is a degenerative or destructive change in the macula. The macula is a very small area on the retina at the back of the eye that functions to see fine things and perform activities such as daily reading and driving. When the macula becomes dysfunctional, central vision becomes blurred, darkened, or distorted. Macular degeneration can affect both your distance and near vision, making activities such as threading a needle or reading difficult or completely impossible. There are no prominent symptoms in the early stages, and some patients experience vision loss, distorted vision, and dark shadows in front of their eyes. As a simple example, patients say that when they read a book, they can’t read the word next to it, which is a manifestation of the early stage of macular degeneration. With the gradual aggravation of macular degeneration, vision will be further impaired and even cause permanent blindness. In real life, there are some similarities between the symptoms of macular degeneration and presbyopia, for example, patients will have blurred vision and reading difficulties when reading newspapers, therefore, many patients are prone to confuse the two with each other. In the case of presbyopia, when reading newspapers, the text is often blurred, and the words on it will become a mass or a piece, making it difficult to see the specific content when reading close to it. And when suffering from macular degeneration, the lines and lines of words on the newspaper will become distorted in the eyes of the patient, the image of the person will become distorted; no longer see in front of the eyes is a brightly colored picture, but a grey piece; or the middle of the vision appeared in the black shadow. These special symptoms are not found in presbyopia. Therefore, once an elderly person experiences these conditions, he or she should go to the ophthalmology department of the hospital as soon as possible for a professional fundus examination, so as not to give the eye disease a chance to continue to progress. The most obvious symptom of cataract patients is the gradual loss of vision, and some patients may have changes such as glare, monocular diplopia or polymetropia and refraction. If there is a sudden change in the size of things you see, distortion of vision, seeing something straight as curved, dark or yellowish color or a sense of flashing lights and fixed black shadows in front of your eyes, then the biggest possibility is that there is something wrong with your eye’s “negative”, that is, macular degeneration, because cataracts don’t have any of these abnormalities in visual perception. The main symptom of macular degeneration is a loss of central vision and a dark shadow in the center of the visual field, which may not occur when both eyes are used at the same time. However, when using one eye, a dark shadow appears in the visual field. In addition, the vision will be distorted, straight lines become curved, horizontal lines become wavy lines, etc.; the contrast of seeing will also be reduced, and there will no longer be a bright, clear picture in front of your eyes, but a gray, indistinguishable image. If one eye develops, will the other eye follow? How long does it usually take? It is not necessary for macular degeneration to develop in the other eye as well. Studies have found that patients with macular degeneration in one eye have a 40% chance of developing age-related macular degeneration in the other eye within 5 years. What are some ways that macular degeneration can be detected early? Macular degeneration causes different symptoms in different people. Early on it may be difficult to detect the condition because sometimes vision loss in only one eye and good vision in the other eye persists for years. However, when both eyes are involved, the loss of central vision can be noticed very quickly. You should go to a hospital ophthalmologist as soon as possible if you have any of the following symptoms: words on a piece of paper look blurry, the center of your field of vision is darkened or missing.