Rituximab Effective for Autoimmune Retinopathy
By Jean Shaw and selected by Richard K. Parrish II, MD
Journal Highlights
American Journal of Ophthalmology, August 2017
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Davoudi et al. set out to report outcomes for patients with autoimmune retinopathy (AIR) treated with rituximab as well as to evaluate whether adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (AO-SLO) is an effective monitoring tool for these patients. They found that visual acuity (VA) either improved or stabilized in the majority of the patients. They also found that AO-SLO findings remained stable during treatment; however, these results did not reach statistical significance.
For this retrospective case series, the investigators evaluated data on 16 AIR patients (30 eyes) who were examined at 1 center during 2010-2016. All were treated with a loading and maintenance dose of rituximab. In addition, all patients received ancillary testing, including electroretinograms (ERGs), visual fields, and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT). A subset of patients (n = 4) had AO-SLO images that could be analyzed.
For the primary outcome, VA improved in 2 patients, stabilized in 11, and declined in 3. The variances may reflect the point in the disease course during which treatment was initiated, the authors said, as the 2 patients who experienced improvement started rituximab early on during their disease. ERG and SD-OCT parameters as well as AO-SLO cone densities were stable during treatment.
The authors noted that larger studies with longer follow-up are needed to prospectively assess the effectiveness of rituximab and the use of AO-SLO to monitor disease progression.
The original article can be found here.