New PRO instrument helps measure patient experience with therapies such as anti-VEGF agents, lasers to treat their eye disease

Author(s):

Diana Do, MD, professor of ophthalmology at Stanford's Byers Eye Institute, presents research on a newly developed, novel patient-reported outcome instrument (PRO) for patients who have proliferative diabetic retinopathy and who are undergoing treatment with either intravitreal anti-VEGF therapy, or panretinal photocoagulation.

This video transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Hi, I'm Dr. Diana Do, professor of ophthalmology at the Byers Eye Institute at Stanford University.

I had the pleasure of presenting research that our team conducted looking at developing a novel patient reported outcome instrument for patients who have proliferative diabetic retinopathy and who are undergoing treatment with either intravitreal anti-VEGF therapy, or panretinal photocoagulation.

We decided to embark on this project because we realize there is no pre-existing patient-reported outcome (PRO) instrument that truly captures the patient experience of patients who are undergoing these therapies for their vision threatening eye disease.

We did an extensive literature review, then a round of interviews with both retina specialists and over 80 patients to understand their treatment experience.

From that, we developed a new novel PRO instrument which we call the diabetic retinopathy scale, and we hope to validate this instrument in more patients to truly capture how they feel they experience with therapies such as anti-VEGF agents, or with laser to treat their eye disease.

I look forward to giving you more updates in the near future.