The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey everyone, I’m Sruthi Arepalli, MD, from Emory University, and today I had the pleasure of presenting our talk on looking at the treatment of cystoid macular edema and infectious retinitis at the American Society of Retina Specialists in Montreal.

Essentially, our talk looked at the management of cystoid macular edema (CME) in patients with a history of infectious retinitis. And the reason why I was so interested in this topic is that we know how to treat CME in patients with noninfectious uveitis. We throw steroids at them in various forms, they do well, and we all get to move on. But infectious retinitis is a little bit different. We don’t have strict guidelines on what to do for these patients. Everything that’s in the literature is usually a case report or a small case series and we’re always worried about reactivating the underlying disease when we put steroids on it.

We performed a retrospective review of patients at Emory Eye Center and we found 53 eyes in 44 patients. Essentially what we found is that the majority of patients reached resolution through topical steroid drops. The caveat is that they were often treated for long periods of time and sometimes required multiple cycles to obtain resolution. Rarely, we used things like local steroids or systemic steroids and although we reached for them less often, we did see that there was a higher resolution rate with these options. We probably reached for them less because we’re concerned that with these stronger, more potent variations, we are more at risk for reactivating the retinitis. And it’s very patient dependent—you want to make sure that the patient is on their antivirals and very compliant as well. Overall, in our entire group, we saw that 75% of eyes [40/53] were able to obtain resolution by the follow-up period and 8 additional eyes showed marked improvement.

We also looked at complications. We saw that the intraocular pressure did rise in a few patients, but they did well generally just with observation or drops. And most importantly, we saw no cases of reactivation, which was very reassuring.

Overall, we’re able to see that these patients do respond to therapy. They just might require more therapy than our noninfectious uveitis patients, and they require very careful monitoring to watch out for complications such as reactivation.

Thanks so much. RP