Abstract
Purpose:
Quality of life is an important outcome often overlooked when evaluating the success of retinal detachment surgery. This study aimed to compare quality of life between patients who underwent scleral buckle (SB), pneumatic retinopexy (PR), or pars plana vitrectomy (PPV) for treatment of rhegmatogenous retinal detachment.
Methods:
A modified version of the Visual Function Questionnaire (VFQ-25) was administered by mail or phone interview to patients who had undergone either SB, PR, or PPV between January 1991 and December 2013. Results were calculated by subgroup analysis of the VFQ-25, MANOVA, one-way ANOVA, two-tailed t-test, and a Basic Logistic Regression.
Results:
80 patients participated in the survey, including 31 SB patients, 28 PR patients, and 21 PPV patients. Patients who underwent PPV had a lower VFQ-25 Composite score (50.49±28.44) than patients who had SB (78.86±18.99, p = 0.001) or PR (81.1±19.04, p < 0.001), but there was no difference between SB and PR patients (p = 0.887). PPV patients scored significantly lower than SB and PR patients in general health, general vision, near activities, distance activities, social functioning, mental health, dependency, driving, and color vision. No difference was found for recovery time or post-op difficulty between the three groups. There was a trend toward a higher percentage (89.5%) of PR patients being willing to repeat the procedure in their fellow eye compared to SB patients (61.9%, p = 0.058) and PPV patients (71.4%, p = 0.199), but there was no significant difference between SB and PPV patients (p = 0.562).
Conclusions:
Patients who had SB or PR had a similar post-operative quality of life, which was higher than patients who had PPV. Even though SB is a more invasive procedure, it resulted in similar quality of life measures as those reported by PR patients. However, there was a trend toward a higher percentage of patients willing to repeat their procedure on their fellow eye in the PR group than both the SB and PPV groups, indicating that quality of life is not the only factor that determines patient preferences.