ARVO LIVE: 5 year follow up of SCORE2

Ophthalmology Times® talked with Michael Ip, MD, about the 5 year follow-up of the original SCORE2 dataset from the NIH-sponsored clinical trial.at this year's ARVO meeting.

Video transcript

Editor’s note: Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Michael Ip, MD:

I've been asked to talk about the research that's being presented here at ARVO from my group. And a brief description of it would be that it is a 5 year follow up of the original SCORE2 dataset from the NIH sponsored clinical trial.

We're very happy to be here. We're very happy to talk about this research because to us, it's very exciting to understand how central retinal vein occlusion responds to repeated long term anti-VEGF therapy out to 5 years. Much of this information has not been known up until this careful analysis was performed. And I want to focus on 1 of the imaging biomarkers that's been presented here at ARVO and that relates to non-perfusion area and leakage as seen both on Ultra-wide-field fluorescein angiography as well as in the central 6 mm of the macula.

Basically, what we have found is that at presentation, non-profusion area is about 10 disk areas, or about 5%, of the wide-field network grid that we use in the study. This change to about 5% out at 6 years, or about .1 disk area, so essentially not much change in the area of non perfusion on the wide-field network grid. Similarly in the ETDRS central grid, the non-perfusion area changed from about 2.5% to 5% from baseline out to 5 years. So we didn't see much change in non-profusion area with anti-VEGF therapy administered as per the SCORE2 study out to 5 years. So we didn't see regression of non-perfusion, nor did we see progression of non-perfusion area and that's really new information.

Additionally, one of the other things we looked at, in this analysis was the effect of leakage with repeated anti-VEGF therapy as administered in this clinical trial. And what we found is that leakage on the fluorescein angiogram was present in about 100% of the eyes at baseline, and 80% of the eyes at 5 years still had leakage. However, the leakage area was reduced from about 35% at baseline to 10% out at 5 years, so anti-VEGF therapy has quite a profound effect on the degree of leakage from a central retinal vein occlusion.

So these are findings that we are presenting here at ARVO 2023. We're very excited to be here and we're confident this information will help us better manage our patients with this condition. Thank you very much for your attention.