Early and accurate diagnosis of macular edema is paramount
Mohammed Rafieetary, OD, of the Charles Retina Institute, highlights a talk he gave at the 2024 American Academy of Optometry Annual Meeting.
Mohammad Rafieetary, OD:
I had a session called “Mastering Macular Edema: Etiologies, Diagnosis, and Management.” As we know, a lot of patients’ vision loss, in a sense of retinal disease, comes from a variety of damage to the integrity of the macula, and in many cases, this is by fluid accumulation in the macula, which routinely we call macular edema.
There are different causes of this, whether it’s vascular disease, inflammatory disease, caused by tumor formations. A whole host of different things could result in macular edema.
On the other hand, there are some findings, particularly since we use OCT as a main diagnostic tool to look at the macula and detect macular edema. There are conditions that cause what mimics macular edema, but in a sense, is not macular edema, things like myopic tractional schisis, X-linked schisis. These are conditions that may make the macula look like it’s edematous, but it’s really not. We’ll go through that.
As far as specific entities, as we all know, diabetic macular edema is one of the most common causes of vision loss, particularly in our diabetic patients. I’m going to cover that and how we manage diabetic macular edema.
We’re going to talk about other retinal vascular disease. We are going to talk about things like even retinitis pigmentosa that could cause microcystic edema and how do we manage that, inflammatory disease, iatrogenic macular edema. Many of our patients develop CME following cataract surgery, so we go through that.
Causes of inflammation, patients with iridus, erythrocycloidus, and even posterior uveitis can have macular edema. I go through a whole host of these conditions, give some clinical examples, and we’ll cover how it’s best to manage these patients or refer these patients to retina specialists.
What I would’ve liked my audience to capture is the importance of timely and accurately diagnose the causes, and also the management plans for somebody who develops a variety of macular disease, whether it is age-related macular degeneration, diabetic macular edema, etc.
We have to do the best we can to have the best patient outcome.
