RESEARCH ARTICLE
Transcutaneous Electrical Retinal Stimulation Therapy for Age-Related Macular Degeneration
Kei Shinoda1, 2, Yutaka Imamura1, Sayaka Matsuda1, Maiko Seki1, Atsuro Uchida1, Terry Grossman3, Kazuo Tsubota*, 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2006Volume: 2
First Page: 132
Last Page: 136
Publisher ID: TOOPHTJ-2-132
DOI: 10.2174/1874364100802010132
Article History:
Received Date: 11/6/2008Revision Received Date: 9/7/2008
Acceptance Date: 25/7/2008
Electronic publication date: 26/08/2006
Collection year: 2008

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestrictive use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
This reports the preliminary outcome of a transpalpebral electrical retinal stimulation therapy for age-related macular degeneration (ARMD).
Twenty-one patients consisting of 16 with wet-type (Group-W) and 5 with dry-type (Group-D) ARMD with a mean age of 73.9 ± 9.5 years (range 51 to 85 years) were recruited for this study. Transpalpebral electrical retinal stimulation (20 minutes, 800 μA) was applied on the patients 4 times per day for up to 1 month. The mean best-corrected visual acuity (Early Treatment Diabetic Retinopathy Study [ETDRS] score) changed from 29.5±5.1 to 31.8±5.0 in Group-W and from 39.8±4.7 to 42.9±4.9 in Group-D. Neither ocular nor systemic adverse effects were observed with the exception of one patient who developed contact dermatitis. Due to several limitations such as lack of control, patients’ learning effect, etc, the efficacy of the therapy could not be drawn. This preliminary study, however, showed that the transpalpebral electrical retinal stimulation therapy can be non-invasively applied on wet-type ARMD patients.