Background and Objectives: This study shows the clinical data of 1-year follow-up of 8 patients with degenerative macular diseases who received suprachoroidal adipose tissue derived mesenchymal stem cell (ADMSC) implantation. Methods: and Results: This prospective, single-center, phase 1/2 study enrolled 8 eyes of 8 patients with degenerative macular diseases of various reasons who underwent suprachoroidal implantation of ADMSCs. All patients had severe visual field defects and severe visual loss. All patients had defective multifocal electroretinography (mf ERG). The worse eye of the patient was selected for the operation. Patients were evaluated on the first day, first month, sixth month and at 1 year postoperatively. Best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), anterior segment and fundus examination, color photography, optical coherence tomography (OCT) and visual field (VF) examination were carried out at each visit. Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) and mfERG recordings were performed at the end of the sixth months.All 8 patients completed the 1 year follow-up. None of them had any systemic or ocular complications. Seven of the patients experienced visual acuity improvement, visual field improvement and improvement in the mfERG recordings. We found choroidal thickening in OCT of the four treated eyes. Conclusions Even though the sample size is small, stem cell treatment with suprachoroidal implantation of ADMSCs seems to be safe and the improvements were encouraging. To optimize the cell delivery technique and to evaluate the effects of this therapy on visual acuity and the quality of life of these patients, future studies with larger number of cases will be necessary.

Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) typing of large groups of patients with various autoimmune diseases has demonstrated that some HLA alleles occur at higher frequencies in specific diseases than in the general population. Chronic urticaria has been shown to have an autoimmune basis by a previous study which found an association between chronic urticaria and specific HLA groups. We investigated the HLA subtypes of Turkish chronic urticaria patients. For this purpose 42 Turkish patients with chronic urticaria and 115 healthy controls were typed for HLA-DR and DQ by PCR-SSP (Polymerase Chain Reaction Sequence Specific Primers) low resolution DNA technique. We found an increased frequency of DR4 (42.9%, p=0.01) in chronic urticaria patients in comparison with that in healthy controls. This study supports the hypothesis that HLA alleles may be involved in the pathogenesis of chronic urticaria and that they appear to be directly involved in the initiation of the immune response.
Chronic Disease ; HLA-DQ Antigens/genetics ; HLA-DR Antigens/genetics ; HLA-DR4 Antigen/genetics ; Histocompatibility Antigens Class II/*genetics ; *Histocompatibility Testing ; Human ; Urticaria/*genetics/*immunology