Abstract
Purpose: :
to evaluate the intravitreal Ranibizumab (Lucentis® Genentech Inc, South San Francisco, California, USA) effect on anatomical characteristics of CNV.
Methods: :
retrospective analysis of indocyanine green angiography images of 40 eyes of 40 consecutive patients with diagnosis of choroidal neovascularization in age-related maculopathy treated with Ranibizumab. Patients were treated on PRN basis after a loading phase of 3 consecutive injections of 0.5 mg Ranibizumab every 4 weeks. At baseline, 1 month after the loading phase and at 1 year, among the routine visits visual acuity (VA) and indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) were performed. Based on fluorescein angiography images, we divided the patients into 2 groups: classical (12 cases) and occult choroidal neovascularization (28 cases). We excluded patients with huge hemorrhages and fluid hiding the neovascular net. ICGA images were analyzed by two expert retina specialists (GS, MO) to identify the area of the lesion on stereo-pair ICGA images. Data were analyzed with student-t test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) using R-software.
Results: :
We observed that only classical lesions show a statistically significant contraction at three months (p-value = 0.03517) and no more at 1 year follow-up (p-value = 0.079). The occult lesions show no statistically significant contraction neither at 3 months (p-value=0.48) nor at 1 year (p-value = 0.72 at 1 year). VA is significantly influenced by the number of injections ( p-value = 0.034). Type of lesion and mean area do not influence the net contraction.
Conclusions: :
Many studies show the Ranibizumab ability to reduce the neovascular activity. Very few information are available in the literature about its direct effect on the vessels. We found that Ranibizumab has no lasting contraction effect on the neovascular-net.
Keywords: age-related macular degeneration • imaging methods (CT, FA, ICG, MRI, OCT, RTA, SLO, ultrasound) • drug toxicity/drug effects