Randomized controlled trials are the gold standard in medical research, providing evidence of the efficacy of a treatment in well-defined patient populations. By contrast, real-world studies explore the effectiveness of treatments in routine clinical practices, often with diverse patient populations. While both randomized controlled trials and real-world studies contribute to the understanding of the benefits and risks of therapies, they generate different types of data and serve complementary purposes. Real-world studies evaluating the management of neovascular age-related macular degeneration (nAMD) have shown that visual outcomes achieved with anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in clinical practice often differ from those derived from clinical trials, highlighting the importance of assessing such outcomes in real world studies. Benefits have included finding variations in treatment provision leading to service improvements, the understanding of the need for continued and higher than previously provided treatment frequency, and new treatment regimens such as treat and extend. There is potential for the scope of real-world studies to be expanded to include other patient outcomes, such as on quality of life, thus providing decision-makers with additional information to complement the data collected in randomized controlled trials. Physicians, patients, and regulators stand to gain much from further development and conduct of real-world studies. We provide an overview of the importance of real-world evidence in the management of nAMD with anti-VEGF therapy, describes sources of real-world evidence, and assesses the relative strengths and limitations of randomized controlled trials and real-world studies.< Réduire