Abstract
Purpose :
To determine the proportion of eyes that maintained the BCVA (losing <15 ETDRS letters) at 24 months.
To calculate the mean central macular thickness at two years.
To highlight the benefits associated with using a structured follow up scheme.
Methods :
Study design: The study was conducted retrospectively from May 2018.
All data were collected and analysed using MediSoft records, no patient-identifying data were used.
Inclusion criteria: All patients on the aflibercept treatment protocol for wet AMD who completed two years of follow up (n = 183).
Exclusion criteria:
Patients who did not complete one year under follow up.
Patients who were switched from or to ranibizumab.
Results :
Demographics: average age is 73 years, 63% are females and 37% are males. The mean baseline visual acuity for the aflibercept protocol patients is 0.64.
The number of clinic visits for the aflibercept group and the number of injections in the first year are fixed, all patients were seen three times and received seven injections per eye.
The mean baseline CMT was 354.6µm and the final is 246µm with a mean reduction of 108.6µm.
The mean final visual acuity is 0.48 (LogMAR) for the aflibercept fixed dose group with a gain of 8 letters.
None of the patients developed any complications related to the injections and none of the co-morbidities made the treatment with guarded prognosis.
Conclusions :
Adopting a fixed dose treatment protocol for macular degeneration with aflibercept helps with achieving significant visual improvement in patients who have no macular structural damage, improves the capacity by enabling clinics to run semi-autonomously and is more convenient from the point of view of appointment arrangement.
This abstract was presented at the 2019 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Vancouver, Canada, April 28 - May 2, 2019.