The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi everybody, I'm Jay Chhablani, MD, a retina specialist from UPMC Vision Institute. Here at Retina World Congress, I presented on macular telangiectasia type 2 (MacTel) masquerades.

As you all know, MacTel is a very subtle disease. Many times, it is difficult to diagnose in the clinic because it has many overlapping features with other diseases. That’s why the organizers gave me the opportunity to speak about the masquerades of MacTel.

I presented the common imaging features of MacTel and explained how they differ from other diseases. One of the common diseases we want to differentiate from macular telangiectasia is age-related macular degeneration (AMD). As we know, AMD has typical signs of drusen and sometimes choroidal neovascularization (CNV). By contrast, macular telangiectasia tends to have thinning of the retina, loss of the ellipsoid zone, and inner retinal thinning, because the mechanism of macular telangiectasia involves neurodegeneration.

In my talk, I also presented a flowchart or guideline for how we can go step-by-step and differentiate among various diseases using multimodal imaging, which is very commonly used in our clinic. I would recommend going to the talk or to the literature on this topic.

Thank you. RP