To the Editor.
—Lewen and Eifrig,1 in the January 1988 issue of the Archives, reported a case of air injection pneumatic retinopexy that was complicated by subretinal air. The retina was successfully reattached using a scleral buckling procedure and intravitreal air tamponade.I have been using intravitreal injections of filtered room air to tamponade the retinal break and cryotherapy to create a chorioretinal adhesion for repair of selected retinal detachments. More than 30 operations have now been performed. Initially, approximately 1 mL of intravitreal air was used, although now I routinely use 0.35 to 0.4 mL of air, which appears to be sufficient to tamponade small breaks. The preliminary findings were presented at the Pneumatic Retinopexy Symposium, held in San Diego, Calif, in August 1988.Lewen and Eifrig stated that the air bubble was inadequate in size to tamponade the retinal break approximately 6 hours later. This cannot be