Innovations in retinal detachment surgery

[kingofvarden]

Are there any innovations in RD surgery that are likely to enter clinical use within the next 10 years? 20 years? Within my lifetime?

I find it very hard when looking at things online to see really how far we are from seeing certain things passing the "clinical trial" stage and becoming universally accepted. One or two pharmacological preventative measure against PVR seems to be in fairly late-stage trials and from what I can see, isotretinoin is looking particularly promising. Even though it's in Phase 4, though, they still seem to need to do further trials before anything much else happens. This all seems to have been discussed since the late 1990s from what I can see.

Vitreous substitutes sound very interesting and the Foldable Capsular Vitreous Bodies sound promising. I can only see these at Phase 1 just now, which means at least it has had limited trials on humans and not just animals. This I think is the US system and I'm not sure how clinical trials work elsewhere (I live in the UK). I have certainly heard of someone here being offered as a trial the possibility of "silicone oil in a sack" if it turned out that she developed problems from long-term retention of oil - but this was elsewhere in the country.

Obviously these kinds of things could, if they were ever to become available, make the prospect of future redetachment a whole lot less scary, particularly for people like me who (often against our own better judgement) worry about the future, even when things seem fine for now! For aphakes like me, anything that could either reduce the need for long-term tamponade (by getting rid of or preventing PVR) or else make that tamponade a bit less susceptible to scary things like acute pupillary block, would be of huge interest. It does seem though as if some of these things have been "in the pipeline" for rather a long time, and I'm guessing the difficulty must be (given how rare RD is) in getting enough people together for a detailed multi-centre investigation that takes it all out of the science lab and into a clinical setting.

Any thoughts on all this would be very much appreciated!

[JohnHaganMD]

If the world doesn't blow itself up there will continue to be yearly improvements of retina surgery. A time frame of 10-20 years is impossible to forecast. Remember there is already an artificial eye for certain eye problems (Argus 2)

[kingofvarden]

Thanks Dr. Hagan. I've seen things like this and they look interesting. I had assumed (since people were mainly talking about retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration) that these sorts of things were mainly for people with otherwise well-behaved retinas that were degenerating rather than detaching, but I did see someone medical somewhere talking about the possible use of something a bit like this in RD cases too.

[JohnHaganMD]

Even physicians and scientists in medical research never try and predict what will be or not be a decade from now.  Your time might be spent on more productive endeavors and leading a healthy lifestyle physical and mental.

[kingofvarden]

Thanks - will try to follow this advice!

[JohnHaganMD]

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