Long Term Safety of Cooling Anesthesia for Intravitreal Injection

Summary

Participation Requirements

Description

Intravitreal injections have become the standard of care for administering medications for retinal diseases such as age related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. There is considerable apprehension among patients receiving these injections, primarily revolving around adequate anesthesi...

Intravitreal injections have become the standard of care for administering medications for retinal diseases such as age related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. There is considerable apprehension among patients receiving these injections, primarily revolving around adequate anesthesia during the injection. Current methods of anesthesia involve topical anesthetic drops, lidocaine gels, or subconjunctival injections of lidocaine, which suffer from either poor anesthetic effect, corneal irritation, or subconjunctival hemorrhage, as well as significant time for the onset of anesthesia. Recens Medical has developed a novel medical device which can precisely and rapidly cool the surface of the eye This device cools to a temperature around -5 to -15 degrees Celsius, about the temperature of a cold ice cube, and thus has an excellent safety profile compared to conventional ophthalmic cryotherapy units. The value of such a device is both improved patient comfort, as well as increased efficiency and workflow for retina specialists administering intravitreal injections. This device has been extensively tested in animal safety studies as well as pilot human studies and has not demonstrated any serious adverse effects and has shown anesthetic effects comparable to current standard of care. The purpose of this clinical study is to evaluate the long term safety and efficacy of cooling anesthesia application to the eye as anesthesia for intravitreal injection using a novel cooling anesthesia device.

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