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Survey reveals global trends and differences among retina specialists
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SAN FRANCISCO — Results of a “global trends” survey showed U.S. retina physicians out of sync with their counterparts in other continents with respect to managing endophthalmitis after intravitreal injection in patients with hand motion vision.
Moderator Kourous A. Rezaei, MD, presented results of the international Global Trends survey, which included approximately 1,100 respondents from 40 societies, including the American Society of Retina Specialists.
“This, I think, is a big discrepancy between the U.S. and Europe, and also almost the rest of the world, where most of them do vitrectomy,” Rezaei said at the ASRS annual meeting here.
In the U.S., “tap and inject” was seen as the management strategy of choice over pars plana vitrectomy, whereas pars plana vitrectomy was the treatment of choice for respondents from Africa/Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Central and South America, and Europe.
In the U.S., 72.6% of respondents said they would manage these cases with a tap and inject strategy, whereas only 49.6% in Africa/Middle East, 20.9% in Asia-Pacific, 16.9% in Central and South America and 49.4% in Europe would use tap and inject, according to the survey.
In response to another survey question, regarding whether visual acuity improves then stabilizes or improves then declines in patients on long-term anti-VEGF therapy, 64.1% of respondents from the U.S. said that visual acuity stabilized.
“The majority of people thought that vision improves and following that it stabilizes,” Rezaei said. “This is the opposite to what the real-world data indicate.”
In Europe and Asia-Pacific, that percentage was less, at 44.4% and 50.4%, respectively.
Panelist Glenn J. Jaffe, MD, said of this finding, “It’s interesting when you look across the regions, most people thought the vision improved and then stabilized. When you look at Asia-Pacific and Europe, at least a higher proportion of the physicians were better aligned with reality — what actually happens. If you look at multiple studies, across the board, those studies show that the vision does get better over the first couple of years and then it declines.” – by Patricia Nale, ELS
Reference:
Rezaei KA. Global trends in retina. Presented at: American Society of Retina Specialists annual meeting; Aug. 9-14, 2016; San Francisco.
Disclosures: Kourous and Jaffe report no relevant financial disclosures.