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New assessment tool to aid in treatment of LSCD patients
A new tool is helping doctors treat patients with limbal stem cell deficiency, according to a press release from Stem Cells Translational Medicine.
The assessment method, developed by researchers at University College London and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, allows doctors to test the efficiency of treatments for limbal stem cell deficiency (LSCD).
“Assessing how well they perform has been severely hampered by the lack of biomarkers for LSCD and/or validated tools for determining its severity,” Alex Shortt, MD, PhD, of University College London’s Institute of Ophthalmology and lead investigator in the study, said in the release. “In virtually all studies of limbal stem cell transplantation to date, the clinical outcome has been assessed subjectively by the investigating clinician. This is clearly open to significant measurement and reporting bias.”
Researchers developed the grading tool around four LSCD indicators: corneal epithelial haze, superficial corneal neovascularization, corneal epithelial irregularity and corneal epithelial defect, according to the study. They named the tool the Clinical Outcome Assessment in Surgical Trials of Limbal stem cell deficiency (COASTL).
In the study, researchers used COASTL to analyze treatments for patients with aniridia or Stevens-Johnson syndrome (SJS) that had undergone a limbal epithelial transplantation (allo-CLET).
“The COASTL tool showed that following allo-CLET there was a decrease in LSCD severity and an increase in visual acuity up to 12 months post-treatment, but thereafter LSCD severity and visual acuity progressively deteriorated,” Shortt said in the press release. “However, despite a recurrence of clinical signs, the visual benefit persisted in 30% of aniridic and 25% of SJS patients at 36 months."
“The Corneal Society is currently facilitating a consultation among the LSCD research community on adopting such a standardized system for reporting outcomes so that comparisons between studies and techniques can be made," the authors concluded.