Risk for acquired retinal detachment in pediatric coloboma may be low
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The risk for acquired retinal detachment in children with optic nerve coloboma or chorioretinal coloboma may be lower than previously thought, according to a study.
“Retinal detachment associated with chorioretinal or optic nerve coloboma is quite uncommon during childhood but does occur,” corresponding author Gil Binenbaum, MD, MSCE, chief of ophthalmology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told Healio/OSN. “Children are unlikely to report symptoms, so regular fundus exams to check for a break or detachment make sense.”
The authors conducted a retrospective cross-sectional study of children examined between May 2009 and July 2020 who had optic nerve coloboma or chorioretinal coloboma in one or both eyes.
The study included 387 eyes of 258 patients. Two eyes of two children, aged 7 years and 14 years, had acquired retinal detachment, for a rate of retinal detachment per eye of 0.52% and a rate of retinal detachment per patient of 0.78%.
“The discordance between our findings and prior studies is likely due to referral bias and the large number of adults in previous study populations,” the authors wrote.
A limitation of the study was that the prevalence of detachments could be underestimated due to the difficulty of conducting thorough retinal examinations in children, the authors wrote.