Effectiveness at 1 year of monthly versus variable-dosing intravitreal ranibizumab in the treatment of choroidal neovascularization secondary to age-related macular degeneration.

Purpose: To evaluate the visual acuity results of monthly ranibizumab injections compared with a variable-dosing schedule for the treatment of neovascular age-related macular degeneration.

Methods: A retrospective study that compared two cohorts of consecutive patients. All patients were treatment naive, with baseline visual acuity of 20/400 or better, and completed 12 months of therapy. In the first group all patients received monthly injections. In the other group, after 3 monthly loading doses, a variable-dosing schedule was used, based on a monthly clinical assessment and optical coherence tomography.

Results: Fifty-six consecutive patients (60 eyes) were included. At 12 months the median number of injections were 12 and 8, respectively, and the mean change in Snellen visual acuity was an improvement of 0.27 logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution in the monthly treated group versus 0.21 logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution improvement in the variable-dosing group (P = 0.53). In the monthly treated group 96.8% of eyes lost <0.3 logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution versus 96.6% of eyes in the variable-dosing group (P = 1.0).

Conclusion: We were able to show that in our clinical setting patients achieved similar visual acuity results with either monthly injections or with a variable-dosing protocol. There was a trend toward better results with monthly treatment.