Primary Retinal Detachment

70
reports, with a cumulative success rate of 97.4%.When PR fails, the
most common second technique employed was SB; however, a
number of patients undergo either pars plana vitrectomy (PPV)
alone or PPV with SB.
Visual (Functional) Results
The functional results of PR reported in the literature vary widely,
so that it is difficult to compare and summarize the data. For those
patients with macula-involved detachments, final best-corrected
visual acuity greater than or equal to 20/50 was achieved in between
35% and 80% of cases. The wide variation in these numbers
probably represents variation in the duration of macular detachment.
Studies that categorized detachments of less than 2 weeks of
macular involvement tended to have better outcome averages.
Overall, most series reported averages for best-corrected visual
acuity greater than or equal to 20/50 following macula-involving
detachments to be about 65%.
When examining the data for patients without preoperative
detachment of the macula, 86% to 88% will have the same or improved
best-corrected visual acuity [9, 13]. However, between 12%
and 14% of patients will lose two or more lines of best-corrected
visual acuity. Surgical failures and complications were the reason
for vision loss in most instances.
Reasons for Failure
4 Pneumatic Retinopexy for Primary Retinal Detachment
The causes of anatomic failure following PR have been examined
in several series [19, 30]. New retinal breaks are the most commonly
cited reason for failure; however, missed pre-existing breaks are
commonly grouped together because of the difficulty differentiating
the two. New and/or missed breaks occur in between 7% and
33% of reported cases [3, 9, 11–18] and account for 48% to 73% of