Guidelines for clinical electroretinography in the dog: 2012 update

Abstract

The full-field, flash electroretinogram (ERG) is now a widely used test of canine retinal function for the clinical diagnosis of hereditary retinal dystrophies and other causes of retinal degeneration, assessment of retinal function in patients with opaque media, ruling out of generalized retinal diseases in patients with sudden loss of vision and in ophthalmological research, as well as in pharmaceutical and toxicological screening for deleterious side effects of drugs and other chemical compounds. In 2002, the first guidelines for clinical ERGs in this species adopted by the European College of Veterinary Ophthalmologists were published. This work provides an update of these guidelines.

Safety and Efficacy Evaluation of rAAV2tYF-PR1.7-hCNGA3 Vector Delivered by Subretinal Injection in CNGA3 Mutant Achromatopsia Sheep

“…Rod function was evaluated using the scotopic component of the ''dog diagnostic'' protocol. 23 Under darkadapted conditions, responses to 10 flashes, presented at 0.5 Hz at a light intensity of 0.01 cd$s/m 2 , were recorded and averaged to generate a single scotopic flash response. This was repeated every 4 min for a total of five scotopic flash responses.…”

Electroretinographic examination for evaluation of retinal activity in dogs with retinal dysplasia

“…The normal baseline values of the implicit times and amplitudes in the control group 0 (based on averaging 50 randomly selected results from the Clinic's database collected during screening examinations of healthy dogs of ages corresponding to the dogs from the experimental group), indicating the median (dotted line) and limits of normality using the 5 th and 95 th percentiles (solid lines), according to the guidelines doi: 10.17221/8821-VETMED for clinical electroretinography in the dog recommended by Ekesten et al (2013), are depicted in the top part of the table. Within the individual groups, ERGs represent the averaged results of examinations on rd eyes in the dogs within a given category.…”

“…A Kooyman-Damhof electrode (Roland Consult, Germany) with an LED Flash 4W generator was used as the active electrode and 0.3 mm stainless steel needle electrodes were used as the reference and ground. The recordings and measurements of amplitudes and implicit times were determined according to the canine ERG protocol (Ekesten et al 2013). Rod-driven responses were tested during dark adaptation following low-intensity (0.03 cd s/m 2 ) flash stimulation six times every 4 min.…”

Electroretinography in dogs: a review

“…Electroretinography represents one of these test modalities and is a widely used technique for assessing outer retinal function (Gouras 1970;Ekesten 2013;Ekesten et al 2013). This examination is objective, non-invasive and provides information on the function of the individual retinal cell types (Gouras 1970;Aguirre 1973).…”

“…An analysis of ERGs can be used to characterise vision disorders (Acland 1988;Narfstrom et al 1995;Yanase et al 1995). Flash ERG is currently used in the early diagnostics of retinal diseases (Narfstrom et al 2002;Ofri 2002;Ekesten et al 2013) and may also be useful in making decisions on cataract surgery (Ofri 2002;Ekesten et al 2013;Wilkie and Colitz 2013).…”