Aims: To report overall patient recruitment characteristics and visual acuity (VA) outcome related to baseline lesion characteristics for patients with choroidal neovascularisation (CNV) treated with verteporfin photodynamic therapy (PDT) during its introduction into routine National Health Service practice.
Methods: Thirteen treatment centres prospectively submitted data on patients undergoing verteporfin PDT for CNV of mixed aetiology between November 1999 and May 2004 into the PDT Users Group (PDTUG) surveillance database. The primary outcome was the proportion of eyes losing <15 letters of VA at 12 and 24 months, follow-up compared with the baseline examination.
Results: One thousand eight hundred and ninety-four eyes of 1755 patients were analysed. Lesion characteristics at baseline were: classic no occult 1152 (67.4%), predominantly classic with occult 531 (31.1%). Recruitment rate rose steadily from 13 in the first to 188 in the final quarter. Data were available at 12 months on 1010 (53.3%) and at 24 months on 310 (16.4%) eyes. The proportion of eyes losing <15 letters was 71% (716/1010) at 12 months and 70% (217/310) at 24 months. At 12 months 91% (917/1010) of patients lost <30 letters. The mean number of PDT treatments for the cohort was 2.4 in the first 12 months. An adverse reaction or event was reported in 8.1% (364/4515) of treatments. Non-visual adverse events were infrequent.
Conclusions: Efficacy and safety of verteporfin PDT in reducing vision loss in macular degeneration can be reproduced in routine clinical practice. Compared to the TAP study, the fewer treatments needed in the PDTUG cohort indicate the potential for better cost-effectiveness.