Open Journal of Ophthalmology, 2022, 12, 91-106
https://www.scirp.org/journal/ojoph
ISSN Online: 2165-7416
ISSN Print: 2165-7408
DOI: 10.4236/ojoph.2022.121010 Feb. 28, 2022 91 Open Journal of Ophthalmology
Intra-Arterial Chemotherapy for
Retinoblastoma
Hanan M. Makhdoum, Shatha A. Albadawi, Haneen H. Almuhammadi
Department of Ophthalmology, Taibah University, Medina, Saudi Arabia
Abstract
The management of retinoblastoma is challenging and complex. Preservation
of the eyeball as well as vision, with minimum morbidity, is the aim in the in-
itial stages. This has been made possible by the use of chemotherapy that
is targeted to the eye in the form of selective intravitreal and intra-arterial chem-
otherapy which has shown promising results. The efficacy and safety of intra-
arterial chemotherapy have been reported by many specialized centers. The
aim of this article was to review the role of intraarterial chemotherapy in the
management of retinoblastoma and its clinical outcomes. In addition, we will
review the possible complications of the procedure. We were able to collect
articles relevant to our research objectives by reviewing the title and abstract
of each article. Irrelevant articles and those that did not meet the inclusion cri-
teria were excluded. This yielded a total of 19 studies. The results indicated that
intraarterial chemotherapy is an effective and new modality of treatment for
retinoblastoma to salvage the eyeball and helps in the prevention of enucleation
with minimal local and systemic complications that are mostly transient. For
future work, we recommend conducting more prospective studies with large
samples and the long duration of follow-up. Also, we recommend future stud-
ies focusing on assessing visual acuity, as most of the currently available studies
did not assess the visual acuity, making the judgment on vision preservation
with IAC difficult.
Keywords
Retinoblastoma, Intra-Arterial Chemotherapy, Intravitreal Chemotherapy,
Eyeball Salvage
1. Introduction
The most common primary intraocular neoplasm in children is retinoblastoma,
representing 3% of all malignancies in children and 10% - 15% of cancers that
How to cite this paper: Makhdoum, H.M.,
Albadawi, S.A. and Almuhammadi, H.H.
(2022) Intra-Arterial Chemotherapy for Ret-
inoblastoma. Open Journal of Ophthalmolo-
gy, 12, 91-106.
https://doi.org/10.4236/ojoph.2022.121010
Received: November 24, 2021
Accepted: February 25, 2022
Published: February 28, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by author(s) and
Scientific Research Publishing Inc.
This work is licensed under the Creative
Commons Attribution International
License (CC BY 4.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Open Access