Anti-vegf therapy in diabetic macular oedema patients over four years

<p>OBJECTIVES: To evaluate visual acuity (VA) outcomes of intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in diabetic macular oedema (DMO).</p> <p>METHODS: In this retrospective cohort study, electronic medical records for all patients undergoing intravitreal injections (IVI) in a tertiary referral centre between March 2013 and October 2018 were analysed. Treatment response in terms of visual acuity outcomes were reported for all eyes over a 4-year observation period.</p> <p>RESULTS: Our cohort includes 2614 DMO eyes of 1964 patients over 48 months. Cox proportional hazards modelling identified injection number (hazard ratio [HR] = 1.18), male gender (HR = 1.13), and baseline VA (HR = 1.09) as independent predictors to reach a favourable visual outcome of more than 70 Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study (ETDRS) letters. Half of our cohort reached 70 letters 1.9 months after starting anti-VEGF therapy. Of those that reached 70 letters, 50% fell below 70 by 14.7 months.</p> <p>CONCLUSION: To date, this is the largest single centre cohort study and over the longest observation period reporting on real-life outcomes of anti-VEGF in DMO. We have made an anonymised version of our dataset available on an open-source data repository as a resource for clinical researchers globally.</p>