Symptoms and diagnosis of epiretinal membrane disease

The Symptoms that patients perceive when they have epiretinal membrane is blurred vision, as there is a slow but progressive decrease in visual acuity, making reading more difficult.

Straight lines may appear wavy, and in advanced cases there is significant loss of central vision. Η peripheral vision does not seem to be affected by the disease.

The diagnosis of epiretinal membrane the patient's medical history and the dredging. The measurement of visual acuity is important, as is the use of the Amsler table, which can give us useful information about the size of the problem.

Specifically, it consists of a grid, which consists of vertical and horizontal lines with a dot in the centre (Figure 2a).

 Figure 2: Normal (left) and pathological (right) Amsler grid.

The background of the grid can be white or black. By observing monocularly and focusing on the central dot, the patient may notice the lines are wavy, blurred or even areas of the panel that are missing (Figure 2b).

The macular edema can be detected by fluorescein angiography, where through intravenous injection of dye and light of a specific wavelength, photographs are taken showing the size of the damage to the retina.

Η optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a diagnostic test, which gives guidelines for treatment.

Figure 3: Normal OCT image on the left and with epiretinal membrane on the right. 

The evaluation of each scan has a high sensitivity to allow the detection of mild-asymptomatic changes, giving information on the prognosis of the disease.