Procedural treatments: Ex-PRESS mini glaucoma shunt

Abstract

The Ex-PRESS™ (Optonol Ltd, Neve Ilan, Israel) is a miniature stainless steel glaucoma implant approved by the FDA in March 2002 that has been in use since then all over the world for the treatment of glaucoma. Currently in the U.S. alone, over 14,000 implantations have been performed in hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to treat primary, secondary, pseudophakic, and refractory glaucomas. Advocates of its use cite more reliable outcomes, which are attributed to the uniformly sized outflow path for aqueous flow. Those who have not adopted it cite the increased cost incurred by using a device during surgery that is billed as a trabeculectomy, and the small number of prospective randomized controlled trials to show its superiority over trabeculectomy [1] © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.