Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD, and this episode is part of our "Clinical Minute" series. Here’s your host, Dr. Neda Shamie.
Dr. Shamie:
In this "Clinical Minute," we'll be discussing a retrospective chart review in which investigators studied the refractive outcomes of phacoemulsification in eyes with Fuchs endothelial corneal dystrophy. Dr. Kendall Donaldson is here to discuss the findings.
Kendall, thank you so much for being here and more importantly, for contributing so much to the science of ophthalmology. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you discovered from this study, and how we can apply it to our clinical practice.
Dr. Donaldson:
Well, thank you so much for the invitation, Neda. It's a pleasure to be here. So I think we've all had the feeling through the years that the femtosecond laser can help us preserve endothelial cells. And we use less energy with the femto laser. And I've really enjoyed using the femtosecond laser for many years. So this particular group of patients, those patients with Fuchs endothelial dystrophy, we've always felt that we could potentially have a benefit here. And so, it was a potential usage for femtosecond lasers, although that's always been debated.
So this was a retrospective study, of course. So we looked at 75 eyes that had phacoemulsification with femtosecond laser, and 150 eyes that had a phacoemulsification without the femtosecond laser, and these were all patients that had mild to moderate Fuchs dystrophy. So basically, they didn't have any corneal edema, they had guttata. And so we wanted to see, you know, when we went and looked over 4 years of our data, and we actually didn't see a difference in these patients with just guttata, milder cases of early Fuchs dystrophy. So we were a little surprised by that because we've always had the feeling that this could be beneficial. And I still do believe that in more severe cases, that it can be beneficial, those patients that are kind of moving towards de-mac, but you're not quite ready to go to that step.
So I think we have more research to do for these patients. But I think it's a starting point. And there are some other studies that have shown preservation of endothelial cells. So it's still, you know, something that we're debating, but this adds another piece to the literature, really defining those patients better that could benefit.
Dr. Shamie:
And it really kind of inspires you to, as you said, extrapolate and maybe kind of subgroup the patients and see if maybe some category of patients do benefit from it.
Dr. Donaldson:
Absolutely. And I think a prospective study, you know, studies with endothelial cell counts in more of the patients, we didn't really have to deal with cell counts for all of these patients. But it would be nice to do this prospectively. And a few smaller prospective studies have been done and have shown improvements, so more to come.
Dr. Shamie:
Absolutely.
Dr. Donaldson:
Thank you.
Dr. Shamie:
Thank you.
Announcer:
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