Management of anterior vitreous traction in proliferative vitreoretinopathy

The major cause of failure in retinal detachment surgery is proliferative vitreoretinopathy. The surgical treatment of proliferative vitreoretinopathy has improved dramatically over the past ten years. Still failure is too common and the need for reoperation remains high. We believe this is often due to anterior vitreous traction. We report our present "conservative" surgical approach to treating such patients using newly developed fiberoptic instrumentation. Using this approach, we have achieved total retinal reattachment in 42 of 48 patients with C3 or greater proliferative vitreoretinopathy with six months or greater follow up.