Every six weeks, former company secretary Margaret Mason feels a sense of dread as she prepares to go to hospital for an eye socket injection.

She finds the experience not only nerve-wracking but also painful – yet it's something she has to do to preserve her failing eyesight.

"I absolutely fear it.

Having a needle in my eyeball is not pleasant but I go as I don't want to go blind,' says Margaret, 71, who lives with her husband John, 70, in Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan.

But soon, she and hundreds of thousands of others could be spared the ordeal thanks to a newly approved treatment.

Margaret has age-related macular degeneration (AMD), one of the leading causes of vision loss in this country.

There are two forms of AMD – dry and wet.

Dry is the early stage, when the macula, which processes sharp central vision, begins to degenerate causing vision problems.

In five to seven percent of cases this will progress to wet AMD, when fragile new blood vessels form in the eye in an attempt to repair damage to the macula, but begin to leak.

"As we age, there is a degeneration in the macula and this leads to a build-up of byproducts that cause small areas of thickening," says Professor Ian Pearce, a consultant ophthalmologist at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital.

“This builds up in the back of the eye, which can lead to blurred vision or a blind spot.

This is when immediate treatment is needed.

As a general rule, the time from suspected diagnosis to treatment is within two weeks.

If you don't treat it quickly enough, you could end up with permanent damage."

Treatment for wet AMD is regular injections, every four to eight weeks, of anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF), which stops the abnormal growth of small blood vessels that can destroy the retina.

Drugs, such as ranibizumab (brand name Lucentis), contain an antibody that stops the chemical signals that prompt blood vessels to leak and grow – they can slow the progression of the condition and even slightly improve vision.

"The problem is that the antibodies disappear after a few days and the blood vessels start leaking again, so many patients need repeated injections over many years," says Professor Pearce.

And this is a problem, as many patients find the injections painful and a source of anxiety.

Then there's the burden of frequent hospital visits to get them done.

But in a major breakthrough, the NHS drug spending watchdog, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), recently approved the use of a new drug - called faricimab - which only needs to be injected once every four month, rather than every four weeks, and is as effective as anti-VEGF drugs.

/Telegraph/