CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Caroline Tate noticed the change in her vision a year ago as she closed her left eye to apply eyeliner. As her right eye focused, she saw a pink blind spot.

Days later, her eye doctor confirmed what she'd feared: Age-related macular degeneration, the nation's most common cause of vision loss in older people, was assaulting her eyesight.

Ms. Tate, 64, knew the disease well. It had blinded her late mother, Dolly Tate. The prominent Charlotte children's activist had lost sight in one eye at age 66, and in the second at age 70.

Ms. Tate's thoughts raced to her future. She imagined no longer being able to read. Or drive. Or see her granddaughter's face. "Vision is a lifestyle," she said. "My lifestyle was terminal."

The chances of getting macular degeneration increase with age, and about 30 percent of people over 75 have some form of the disease.

But now, a new drug is offering some patients hope.

The disease has two forms, one more threatening than the other.

It begins in the "dry" form, as small deposits called "drusen" collect under the macula, the part of the retina responsible for central vision.

The dry form usually progresses slowly, over years. The deposits can damage vision, but often cause no symptoms.

About 10 percent of the time, however, dry turns to the dangerous "wet" form of the disease. In wet macular degeneration, abnormal blood vessels grow under the retina. They bleed and leak, distorting or destroying central vision. Picture a dark hole in the middle of your field of vision.

Once it starts, the wet type can blind in just weeks. It has no cure. And, until recently, laser and drug treatments usually only slowed its progress.

Ms. Tate, a clinical research nurse, had been diagnosed with dry macular degeneration in both eyes at 60.

At that point, she had no symptoms. She got her eyes checked annually by Dr. Andrew Antoszyk a retinologist, and took vitamins he recommended to try to keep the disease from progressing.

Then came the morning last September. She saw the pink spot in her vision while applying eyeliner. Dry had turned to wet in her right eye.

Within days, Dr. Antoszyk began laser treatments. They helped at first, restoring her vision for 20 days. But then the spot returned, bigger and darker.

By late fall, the treatments had stopped working. Because of her clinical research background, Ms. Tate knew that a promising drug trial could be the best hope for saving her vision.

So she got on the Internet and did her homework. In December, she arrived in Dr. Antoszyk's office armed with abstracts of 24 drug trials. Which would be best for her? she asked.

Dr. Antoszyk knew what he'd recommend. Since 2003, he'd been involved in trials of a drug called Lucentis.

When the Lucentis trials began, Dr. Antoszyk figured the drug might stop the disease's progress. But, after treating a few patients, he got a surprise. "The 'wow' factor," he calls it. "People would come back within two to three weeks, and the fluid had dried up and their vision had improved, which was unheard of in the treatment we'd had in the past."