Bevacizumab Treatment for Acute Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion Accompanied by Subretinal Hemorrhage

We congratulate Zhao et al.1 for their study entitled “Bevacizumab Treatment for Acute Branch Retinal Vein Occlusion Accompanied by Subretinal Hemorrhage”. The authors investigated the effect of the presence/absence of foveal subretinal hemorrhage (SRH) on the final best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and central macular thickness (CMT) in patients with macular edema due to branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO). The authors found that, after bevacizumab injections, foveal SRH-positive patients had significantly lower BCVA compared to foveal SRH-negative patients although there was no significant difference before the treatment. After the bevacizumab injections, both SRH-positive and SRH-negative patients had a significant decrease in CMT but only SRH-negative patients had significantly increased BCVA. The authors found that the presence of foveal subretinal spaces, foveal serous retinal detachment (SRD) and foveal SRH predicted unfavorable outcome. At that point, we think that one of the main predictive factors may be the duration of the macular edema until the first injection. Larsson et al.2 argued that as the duration of the macular edema lasts longer, the possibility of irreversible damage to the photoreceptors increases. We also showed that central (2.3 degrees) multifocal electroretinogram amplitude and implicit times were not significantly correlated to CMT in patients with diffuse diabetic macular edema.3 We kindly ask the authors to perform the statistical analyses to explore the effect of the duration of the macular edema on the BCVA and CMT results.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.