Rishi Singh: We Need a Standard Definition for DME

Rishi Singh, MD, from the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, sat down with MD Magazine to discuss the results of the PROMISE study done on the evaluation of aflibercept injections on diabetic macular edema (DME) patients. During the conversation, he brought up what he considers an issue in the treatment of these patients, as there is no standardized ruling on how to define significant edema following cataract surgery.

Rishi Singh, MD: There's a variety of things from this study that I think are really quite important for the doctors who're attending this meeting to sort of take away, and the first is that we have a lot of different, different, different definitions for macular edema following cataract surgery. You can use an OCT criteria, you can use visual criteria, you can use a combined OCT individual criteria.

We really, I think, as a group of retina specialists, need to come up with a more consensus definition for what is significant edema following cataract surgery. I think that's first and foremost because I think the level which we treat is based upon what we think the severity level is, and if we were to add more of a standardized definition, I think more of us would treat based on that standardized definition. Right now, I think people treat based more on what they feel like, based on visual or OCT and sometimes both, but never on every patient do they apply the sort of same standard definition.