The following transcript has been edited for clarity:

Hi, I am Dr. Diana Do at Retinal Physician, and today I have the pleasure of talking with Dr. Chase Ludwig, expert in retinal detachment and myopia. Share with us the exciting presentation you’re giving at the American Society of Retina Specialists.

Chase Ludwig, MD: Thanks so much for the opportunity to talk about it. This work is super important to me. It stems from a question that we all ask ourselves, which is, how can we help prevent tears and detachments in our patients, and especially patients who have had a detachment in 1 eye and are now wondering what they can do for their fellow eye. So we took a look at the TriNetX database, which has over 124 million patients, and we narrowed it down to all patients who had unilateral lattice degeneration. And that left us with about 24,000 patients of whom about 1,400 had had a prior tear detachment. And then we looked to see in those patients what were the different risks for developing tear detachment in the lattice eye. So we looked at myopia status and lens status and phakic status, and we looked at Kaplan-Meier survival curves and basically in nonmyopes, myopes, high myopes, all across the board, if they had had a contralateral detachment in 1 eye, the risk of detaching in the lattice eye was dramatically higher and happened sooner. And when we looked at the number needed to treat, you only needed to treat between 3 and 6 patients who had lattice in 1 eye and had had a contralateral detachment in order to prevent 1 detachment. So that was an incredibly low number in contrast to some prior studies.

Diana Do, MD: That's really amazing data, and I love how you have so many patients in this database. So are you routinely now in clinical practice, if the patient had developed a retinal detachment in 1 eye [and] has lattice in the fellow eye, really recommending laser early on to prevent tears?

Chase Ludwig, MD: Yes. And all lattice is different. So there's posterior lattice, anterior lattice, a lattice with atrophic holes. I take all of these things into account, of course. But as a general rule of thumb, if a patient has had a detachment or tear in 1 eye, I highly recommend that we do laser prophylaxis in the other eye, either at the time of surgery, particularly if we’re doing GA [general anesthesia], or sometime in the 1 month after their surgery after a detached eye.

Diana Do, MD: Well, thank you for sharing this important information and I think it really will help us guide our patient treatments. RP