Comparison of Exudative Age-related Macular Degeneration Subtypes in Japanese and French Patients: Multicenter Diagnosis With Multimodal Imaging

Characteristics of Neovascular Age-Related Macular Degeneration in Brazilian Patients

“…In this study, the overall mean age was 73.7 years, which is in line with the previously published literature [8,24,34]. The mean age of men with PCV was 68.5 years and that of women with PCV was 74.8 years; this age difference between the sexes in PCV patients could suggest a trend of an earlier manifestation of the disease in males, although the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.092).…”

“…In Brazil, there are no reports on the epidemiologic or clinical features of RAP. The proportion (9.2%) of patients with RAP in the present study is higher than that in Asian studies [8,24,32,33] but lower than that observed in the studies by Yannuzzi et al [6] (which involved American patients with exudative AMD), Cohen et al [34] (which involved French patients with exudative AMD) and Freund and colleagues [36] (which involved American patients with exudative AMD). …”

“…The literature shows that neovascular AMD subtypes have different features depending on the population studied [6,8,23,24]. The present study of Brazilian patients demonstrated that 65 (24.5%) of 265 eyes with neovascular AMD were diagnosed as having PCV.…”

“…The proportion of PCV in Asian patients is higher than in American and European patients with neovascular AMD [8,19,23,24,25,26,27,28]. The results of the current study show that the percentage of PCV (22.2% of patients) is similar to percentages in some reports [9,28,29] in Asian populations, but lower than the percentage reported by Maruko et al [8] and Coscas et al [24] in the Japanese population. The Brazilian population is ethnically diverse, and therefore, studies on multifactorial diseases, involving risk factors such as race and genetic polymorphisms, are relatively complex.…”

“…It is possible that newly developed equipment that incorporates significant advances, such as multimodal images and the possibility of overlapping OCT scans with angiograms, will allow for a more sophisticated analysis of CNV subtypes and the identification of smaller polyps. Coscas et al [24] reported that multimodality imaging significantly improved the classification of neovascular AMD and suggested that multimodality imaging is very important to differentiate PCV from AMD with occult CNV. In the present study, the Spectralis® SD-OCT system (Heidelberg Engineering) was utilized; FA and an ICG angiogram were performed simultaneously, and in many cases, OCT scans were performed using angiographic (FA and ICG) findings as references.…”