Spontaneous retinal pigment epithelium tear in geographic atrophy
E Cavallero1, F Corvi2, E Souied3
1Department of ophthalmology, IRRCS Ospedale San Raffaele, Vita-Salute University, 20132 Milan, Italy; Department of ophthalmology, university Paris Est Créteil, centre hospitalier intercommunal de Créteil, 94010 Créteil, France.
Purpose:
To report two cases of spontaneous retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) tears occurring in two patients affected with geographic atrophy (GA) due to non-exudative age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Case Report:
Two patients (a 79-year-old man and a 71-year-old woman) presented to our department with progressive visual loss. The man had a best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) of 20/100 in the right eye (RE) and 20/50 in the left eye (LE); the woman had a BCVA of 20/200 in the RE and 20/160 in the LE. Upon complete ophthalmologic examination, revealing a large area of atrophy (>175 μm in diameter) along with pigmentary changes, calcified drusen and no choroidal neovascularization (CNV) in either eye, the patients were diagnosed with GA due to non-exudative AMD. Interestingly, the imaging modalities performed, including fluorescein angiography (FA), indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) and spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT), clearly highlighted the presence of spontaneous RPE tears in the context of non-exudative AMD, while in general, RPE tears are a well-recognized complication of exudative AMD.
Conclusions:
To our knowledge, this is the first description of spontaneous RPE tears as a possible complication of GA due to non-exudative AMD.
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