What is Intravitreal injection?

The intravitreal injection is the method to inject a kind of medical substance directly into the patient’s eye. This injection must be performed in the back area of the eye which is called vitreous cavity. The vitreous cavity is full of vitreous humor gel (a jelly fluid). The intravitreal injection must be performed by a specialist because of its importance.

Intravitreal injection procedure is performed in the situations that the doctor wants to treat some retinal conditions by leading the medications inside the eye. As an example, blockage of the retinal vein (occlusion), a macular degeneration caused by aging or diabetic retinopathy would be healed by intravitreal medication called anti-VEGF. Also the intravitreal steroids are a treatment for uveitis, diabetic retinopathy and retinal vein blockage. These two types of medications would decrease the fluid outflow made by those eye problems. The other type of medications are antibiotics and antiviral or antifungal drugs. This type would stop eye infections like retinitis and endophthalmitis.

Intravitreal injection procedure

For this injection procedure there is no need to move to an operation room, but it is an in-office procedure. You will sit on a chair and your eye and eyelids would be anesthetized so you won’t feel any pain during injection. After you are ready, the doctor will ask you to look in a direction so that he can easily inject the medications inside your vitreous cavity. You do not need to feel worry about it. You will feel a little pressure during the injection. At the end doctor would clean your eye and it’s finished! Intravitreal injection would take only a few minutes.

In some special situations you need to repeat intravitreal injections such as macular edema caused by diabetic problems, blockage of the retinal veins or macular degeneration, because these are some persistent disorders.

Symptoms that lead to intravitreal injection

There are some symptoms for each eye disease that you must notice. For macular degeneration, the first symptom can be a sudden quality change in your sight. It continues with some dark or blurry areas in your vision. You may also have problem to identify the color.

In a case of diabetic macular edema you may see the pictures blurry and the colors faded. Symptoms of retinal vein occlusions (blockage) are vision loss and blurry vision commonly in one eye. You might also see some dark points. In a worse situation the patient would suffer from pain and high eye pressure.

What are the complications of intravitreal injection?

Every surgery would have its particular complications and risks. We will mention some of intravitreal complications in the following:

• Intraocular pressure (pressure inside the eye) would increase
• Some surgeons also claim that a bleeding may occur inside the vitreous gel
• In some cases the patient’s retina might get detached
• Patient might have eye infection
• Vision loss is possible
• The eye may get swollen as a reaction to some drugs
• patient might lose his eye (hardly ever)

Note that these side effects would rarely happen, and they can be controlled.