This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Aqueous shunts regaining popularity in selected cases
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
 Keith Barton |
PARIS — The past 4 years have witnessed a marked swing away from trabeculectomy as primary surgery, resulting in a greater number of laser procedures and a more than fourfold increase in the use of aqueous shunts, according to one surgeon speaking here.
Keith Barton, MD, said at the World Glaucoma Congress that tubes have shown limitations in the past, but that may have been largely due to poor experience. Some surgeons used tubes a few times and were discouraged by the results. More experience, however, has made the use of tubes safer, and they are now regaining popularity.
“More than an expanding role, it might be that surgeons use them more consistently and more often in their traditional role, ie, in eyes where trabeculectomy has an established poor rate of success, such as anterior chamber proliferative conditions, multiple filtration failures, other types of conjunctival scarring, previous buckle. There are certain type of eyes where trabeculectomy just won’t work,” he said.
Studies such as the Tube Versus Trabeculectomy Study, which compared the Baerveldt glaucoma implant to trabeculectomy with mitomycin C, and the Ahmed Baerveldt Comparison Study have helped glaucoma surgeons regain confidence in these implants, “but the trend towards using tube shunts more often started even earlier,” Dr. Barton said.
- Disclosure: Dr. Barton has no relevant financial disclosures.