AGS 2024: Leon Herndon, MD, President of AGS, previews the annual meeting

Leon Herndon, MD, President of the American Glaucoma Society, sat down with David Hutton of Ophthalmology Times to discuss the AGS meeting held in Huntington Beach and what attendees can expect as well as new and exciting information to come from the meeting.

Video Transcript

Editor's note - This transcript has been edited for clarity.

David Hutton:

I'm David Hutton of Ophthalmology Times. The American Glaucoma Society is holding its annual meeting in Huntington Beach, California. Dr. Leon Herndon is AGS President. Thank you so much for joining us today. There certainly are a lot of interesting topics being discussed at this year's event including glaucoma drainage, with some drainage devices going against the industry standard. What are you hearing on this topic?

Leon Herndon, MD:

There are a lot of interesting papers that are going to be presented here during this AGS meeting. We have one in particular, where we're comparing the standard glaucoma drainage device Baerveldt-350 to a new player on the market, the Ahmed ClearPath 350. At Duke, we have a prospective trial that is reporting out this week, the results comparing the Ahmed ClearPath 350 to the Baerveldt-350. So I won't steal your thunder, we want everyone to be excited about what they're going to hear. But we will like to review those results with the audience at this meeting.

David Hutton:

What makes this event such a great conference for Glaucoma specialists?

Leon Herndon, MD:

I think the AGS meeting is an opportunity to bring together the best and brightest minds in glaucoma. Be it basic science, be it clinical science, be it just practice pearls. We'd like to leave this meeting with some ideas and pearls that we can take to the practice when we go back next week. So I think is a very practical meeting, but also a meeting that has cutting edge technology and research that will be discussed.

David Hutton:

Lastly, is there anything new for attendees at this year's event?

Leon Herndon, MD:

Yes, we have several new items. We start the program Wednesday evening with a patient engagement series. Where a patient will be interviewed by me. And we'll have patient and physicians in the audience to kind of discuss in roundtables what the patients are actually experiencing. So we don't want to lose touch with what each patient experiences day to day. We also have a TED type talk, 4 TED type talks, interspersed throughout the program, where our colleagues will talk about issues outside of glaucoma that they deal with on a day to day basis. And finally, we're gonna close with a party, and we're gonna have a disco theme, Saturday Night Fever theme party Saturday night, so we're all looking forward to celebrating what's been a great year.