Results of One-year's Treatment with Ranibizumab for Exudative Age-related Macular Degeneration in a Clinical Setting

Purpose: To evaluate the results of 1 year of treatment with intravitreal ranibizumab for exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in a clinical setting.

Design: Nonrandomized, single-center, retrospective, interventional case series.

Methods: Retrospective analysis of consecutive charts and angiograms of patients with previously untreated exudative AMD, treated in one or both eyes with ranibizumab between January 2 and October 31, 2007. The following were recorded for each patient: age at presentation, gender, treated eye, type of choroidal neovascularization, visual acuity (VA) measured on an Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study chart at baseline and at 52 +/- 6 weeks, the number of performed intravitreal (IVT) injections, and follow-up examinations.

Results: The 122 patients comprised 85 women (70%) and 37 men ranging in age from 56 to 91 years (mean +/- standard deviation, 78.3 +/- 7). In all, 124 eyes were treated on a pro re nata basis after 1 or 3 initial IVT injections. The mean number of IVT injections was 3.79 +/- 1.39 (range, 1 to 7). The mean number of follow-up visits was 8.07 +/- 1.44 (range, 4 to 12). Mean VA +/- standard deviation changed from 56.15 +/- 14 to 56.89 +/- 17 letters (VA gain, +0.7 letters).

Conclusions: The results showed that VA stabilized rather than improved and compared unfavorably with the gains found in randomized clinical trials and the Prospective Optical Coherence Tomography Imaging of Patients with Neovascular AMD Treated with intraOcular Ranibizumab (PrONTO) Study. However in this study, patients were examined less frequently and were treated far less frequently. The present results suggest that a long, regular follow-up is necessary for patients treated with ranibizumab to obtain and preserve significant visual gain, and not only to achieve visual stabilization.