EyeCon 2022: Important updates in retinopathy of prematurity for clinicians

This transcript has been edited for clarity:

I'm Julius Oatts. I'm an assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco. I have the pleasure today of talking about updates in retinopathy of prematurity.

I covered a few things in my talk. First of all, we discussed the updated International Classification for ROP, or ICROP3, which was just released last year. We talked about a few modifications that are subtle, but important, in terms of how we discuss the zone and the stage of disease.

We also talked about plus disease and the kind of continuity between pre-plus and plus disease.

Next, we talked about some of the anti-VEGF agents for ROP and thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of injections versus laser. We talked about some pivotal studies including the recently published dose de-escalation study for bevacizumab. And then also the FIREFLEY study looking at aflibercept for ROP.

Finally, we talked about some of the socioeconomic factors that affect ROP. ROP can be a challenging thing to cover. It does have a high medicolegal risk. It's important to think about how reimbursement works and there's been a few papers that shed some light and transparency around reimbursement rates for physicians.

Ultimately, the paper showed that there's pretty broad ranges of compensation but that overall if there's a contract involved, or a lawyer involved with the contract, then compensation is higher.