Comparative Evaluation of Patient Comfort Following Intravitreal Injections Using Iheezo Versus Standard Anesthesia in a Private Retina Practice

Prospective comparative clinical study.

One hundred eyes of 50 patients were included. All patients received bilateral same-day intravitreal injections, with Iheezo administered to only one randomly selected eye and standard topical anesthesia administered to the contralateral control eye. Ocular discomfort was assessed using a 0-10 numeric rating scale at 2 minutes, 1 hour, 6-12 hours, and 24 hours following injection. The primary longitudinal analysis used a linear mixed-effects model incorporating treatment group, assessment time, and treatment-by-time interaction as fixed effects and patient as a random effect. Between-group differences at individual time points were evaluated using Welch two-sample comparisons with Holm adjustment for multiple comparisons. Patient-level mean discomfort across the four assessments was also compared between groups.