A proportion of asymptomatic retinal detachments will progress. The unfortunate problem when advising patients is that we do not know how large that proportion is.

The information which is available to us is incomplete. This is because the patients that were included in these studies were only followed up for a matter of years, rather than for their whole lifetime. The follow up may also have been incomplete, that is that patients who had an asymptomatic detachment and were not treated developed a retinal detachment which the group of doctors performing the study did not know about.