Table 4: Percentage of PPPV and SBS in individual series of RRD-surgery Table 5: Percentage of PPPV in two different series from the same institution

The choice of operating method in the treatment of RRD depends on the anatomical situation, the technical facilities available, the experience and the individual preferences of the surgeon. Until the 1990s, SBS was the standard operating method in the vast majority of primary cases in Europe, Japan as well as in the USA. Since then, pneumatic retinopexy appears to have evolved as the most popular first-line treatment in the USA [59, 102]. In Europe and Japan, PPPV is gaining widespread popularity and, in some centres, is applied in either numbers comparable to those of SBS or even in the majority of cases [19, 68, 69, 75]. The growing number of choices, further increased by the additional possibilities of combining the methods with each other, has led to the current situation in which significantly different methods are applied in identical or comparable situations of RRD [7]. In this section, the available literature regarding the choice of operating method is reviewed, the preferences in the CCBF over a ten-year period are analyzed and details of the “Recruitment Study” regarding the choice of operating methods are disclosed.