It's the little things that are noticeable when you begin to lose eyesight, Dame Judi Dench has revealed. The 007 star known for her role as M, James Bond's steely no-nonsense boss, says that she's missed reading the newspaper and doing the crossword since she was diagnosed with macular degeneration in 2012.
She doesn't read her scripts anymore, but has friends read the lines to her to memorize, and she finds it most frustrating to not be able to see the face of a person she's dining with in the evening. But the most “appalling” moment dealing with her condition—what she calls the “most traumatic moment of her life”—came in 2017 when she was forced to give up her driver's license.
“I just know I'll kill somebody if I get behind the wheel of a car now,” the 87-year-old British star told Radio News.
The thought that she may lose her vision entirely is obviously daunting. “I don't want to say. I can see enough… You adapt to it. So I ignore it altogether,” Dench said.
She is one of 600,000 people in the UK “adapting” to macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Globally it affects 196 million people, and glaucoma, another leading cause of blindness, affects another 60 million. By2040, those numbers are expected to grow to 288 million and 110 million people worldwide, respectively.1
Both macular degeneration and glaucoma are progressive neurodegenerative eye diseases that gradually erode vision, although they operate in very different ways and affect different regions of the eye. Doctors describe them both as age-related and say that, although the processes may be slowed, once the eye nerves are injured, the damage to the eyes and to the patient's vision is irreversible.
While mainstream technologies and drugs are struggling to address the symptoms of eye disease, however, new light therapies in trials in Canada, Europe and the US in recent years are addressing eye diseases at their root
