In this study, we chose to investigate patients’ awareness of AMD because it is clear that a lack of disease awareness is a common factor for delayed presentation in other eye conditions such as glaucoma, retinal detachment and central retinal artery occlusion.36 37 The only previous study to investigate AMD awareness in the UK population showed a low awareness (16%).38 Our study adds to the existing literature by demonstrating that public awareness of AMD is still limited. Our survey shows that awareness of AMD is unacceptably low (37%), especially considering that this condition is the leading cause of blindness in developed countries.1 The low awareness of AMD is also consistent with the low levels of awareness of AMD in other countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, Bangladesh, China and the USA (range between 5% and 50.5%).21 38–44 It is likely that our findings underestimate the true scale of lack of awareness among the general population because we sampled ophthalmic patients who, by virtue of being surveyed in an eye hospital, are presumably somewhat more attuned to common eye diseases. Our survey also highlights a low awareness of risk factors of AMD (other than age). However, this assessment could be limited by the lack of plausible distractors in the corresponding question which might have increased the respondent’s chances of getting a correct answer(s), hence again underestimating the true scale of lack of awareness.