Uncommon retinal vascular diseases

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Diabetic retinopathy (DR), hypertensive retinopathy (HR) and retinal vein occlusion (RVO) are among the most common retinal vascular diseases, causing severe vision loss in affected patients worldwide. However the spectrum of retinal vascular diseases comprises a wider, more heterogeneous group of clinical entities, that, though less frequent, can prove to be a diagnostic and therapeutical challenge in a clinical setting.

Areas covered: In this review we describe the findings of some uncommon retinal vascular disease using a multimodal approach. In the last 50 years, fluorescein angiography (FA) has been the gold standard for retinal vascular diseases. However, in case of choroidal involvement or masking effect generated by haemorrhage, indocyanine green angiography (ICGA) proved to be very useful. Differently from previous examinations, the newly introduced OCT-Angiography (OCT-A) is less invasive (dyeless) depth-resolved tool and thus may particularly useful for the diagnosis and the follow up of these rare vascular diseases. Furthermore, spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) offers important structural information and is currently essential for the assessment and monitoring macular details.

Expert commentary: FA, ICGA and SD-OCT should be performed in each case of unclear diagnosis in medical retina, in order to establish adequate diagnosis and therapeutic strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Fluorescein angiography
• spectral-domain optical coherence tomography
• optical coherence tomography angiography
• capillary haemangioma
• Coats’ disease
• idiopathic macular telangiectasia
• retinal arterial macroaneurysm
• retinal arteriovenous malformations
• retinopathy of prematurity
• sickle-cell retinopathy

Declaration of interest

G Querques has served as an advisory board member for Allergan, Bayer and Novartis. EH Souied has served as an advisory board member for Novartis, Bayer, Allergan, Thea and Roche. SY Cohen has served as an advisory board member for Novartis and Bayer. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received.