Kostas Boboridis

In newborns with unilateral buphthalmos and presumed congenital glaucoma, the differential diagnosis should include the rare condition of orbitotemporal neurofibromatosis. The authors present the diagnostic challenge of an unusual case of neurofibromatosis type 1 with unilateral congenital glaucoma, buphthalmos, and sphenoid-orbital dysplasia. The accompanying type of osseous orbital dysplasia has rarely been described in the literature, complicating the diagnostic and management process.

The successful treatment of canalicular obstructions continues to represent a therapeutic challenge. Conjuctivodacryocystorhinostomy with a Lester Jones bypass tube is the standard treatment in these situations. Although a high rate of anatomic success can be achieved with this procedure, a relatively high rate of complications and poor patient satisfaction have been reported. Because of this, alternative techniques have emerged. Herein, we review all these techniques described in the literature. Increasing interest in minimally invasive surgery and developments in fiberoptic technology have fueled advances in endocanalicular surgery. Canalicular trephination for obstructions at any level of the canalicular system and laser and balloon canaliculoplasty for focal canalicular and common canalicular stenoses may offer a well tolerated, fast and easy alternative, with potentially better patient satisfaction when compared with conjuctivodacryocystorhinostomy. The alternative techniques to conjuctivodacryocystorhinostomy are less invasive, and respect and utilize any healthy and functional part of the canalicular system. The correct choice of the technique for a given canalicular obstruction, and therefore the long-term success, depends on the site and degree of the obstruction.

Purpose. To report the acute development of hypopyon after primary cryopreserved amniotic membrane transplantation (AMT) for persistent corneal epithelial defect and sterile ulceration. Case Presentation. A selected case report of a 71-year-old male who underwent primary cryopreserved AMT for the management of long-standing corneal epithelial defects and stroma thinning. The patient developed 2 mm sterile hypopyon within 48 hours after AMT for corneal surface reconstruction. He responded well to the intensified routine postoperative topical treatment of steroid and antibiotic eye drops with the hypopyon resolving completely one week later. Five weeks after surgery, the corneal surface was smooth and epithelialized with no anterior chamber reaction or recurrence of hypopyon. Discussion. Hypopyon may develop as a rare complication of primary cryopreserved AMT for sterile corneal defects. It may be attributed to immunologic or hypersensitivity reaction and should be differentiated from...

Dry eye disease (DED) is a common condition with signs and symptoms that vary depending on a wide range of environmental factors to which people are exposed in their daily lives. Factors such as variable temperature, airflow velocity, relative humidity, seasonality, and pollutants can alter the rate of tear film evaporation, improving or exacerbating symptoms of DED. Results from currently available clinical tests do not always correlate well with patient-reported symptoms, and the continually changing environment and variability in DED symptoms present challenges for the design and conduct of clinical trials. Controlled adverse environment chambers allow standardization of temperature, humidity, and airflow and may minimize potential confounding factors in clinical investigations. Their use can promote accurate study of the pathophysiology of DED, discovery of disease biomarkers, and assessment of the effect of various therapeutic approaches on patients' symptoms. Controlled ad...

Glucocorticoids (GCs) are used for Graves' ophthalmopathy (GO) in two different clinical settings: 1) moderately severe to severe eye disease; and 2) mild eye disease, for which radioiodine therapy is given to treat concomitant hyperthyroidism. Intravenous pulse corticosteroids have a small but statistically significant advantage in terms of response rate compared with oral corticosteroids and cause significantly fewer adverse events. Steroids should be used for as short a period of time as possible. The need for large doses of steroid over a long period of time is a hint that other treatment modalities need to be explored. Combination treatment with oral steroids and ciclosporin, another immunosuppressant, are more efficacious than use of either agent alone. The same applies to combination treatment with oral steroids and orbital radiotherapy. Somatostatin analogues (SM-as) have marginal clinical efficacy and are expensive. More potent analogues, like SOM230, could prove to be the treatment of choice in moderately severe cases of GO. The latter, in contrast to the thus far used analogues, has a rather high affinity for all SM receptors except SM receptor 4.

Thyroid eye disease manifests as orbital inflammation resulting in extraocular muscle enlargement and orbital fat proliferation. This causes exophthalmos, ocular motility impairment and eyelid retraction. Numerous surgical procedures have been introduced for correction of exophthalmos by removal of bony walls. The limited success and high complication rate of the early methods lead to the evolution of an alternative procedure for reduction of retrobulbar volume by removal of intraorbital fat. The indications for this procedure extended from orbital decompression to compressive optic neuropathy with satisfactory results. The moderate complication rate and the fact that orbits with predominant muscle enlargement respond purely to this technique leads to the evolution of a combined procedure with orbital fat removal and bony wall decompression. The scattered published evidence comprising retrospective case series highlights the need for prospective controlled clinical trials in order to improve patient care and clinical practice.

Although pediatric Graves' disease is an uncommon condition, children have about the same (or slightly increased) risk as adults to develop Graves' ophthalmopathy (GO) once they have contracted Graves' hyperthyroidism. GO occurs in the same proportion between sexes but with a milder clinical presentation compared with adults. Lid lag, soft tissue involvement and proptosis are the commonest manifestations, whereas restricted eye muscle motility, severe strabismus and optic neuropathy are practically absent. Genetic, immunologic and environmental factors may be associated with the different appearance of GO in children and adolescents. Interestingly, manifestation of GO begins to resemble the adult findings more closely when adolescence approaches. This could be explained by increasing smoking prevalence with age as long as smoking is a proven to be a risk factor for GO, and the odds increase significantly with increasing severity of GO. Management of hyperthyroidism is essential for the control of complications and seems to offer improvement of eye changes upon restoration of euthyroidism. Antithyroid drugs are the first choice treatment. Lasting remission rates though are achieved in less than 30% of cases. Long periods of therapy are needed and risk for side effects (often serious) increases. In resistant or severe cases early radical treatment with surgery or radioiodine is needed. Both can be equally effective and safe in selected cases. Identification of subjects prone to relapses is critical for optimal management. Regarding treatment of thyroid eye disease in childhood, most physicians who are dealing with such cases prefer a 'wait-and-see' policy. Pharmacological intervention, predominantly with steroids, is considered appropriate in case of deterioration or no improvement of eye changes when the patient has become euthyroid. It has been shown that somatostatin analogs (SM-as) might be of therapeutic value in the treatment of active eye disease in adults. Newer generations of SM-as that target a wider range of somatostatin receptors may show markedly superior results in the treatment of ophthalmopathy. Surgical orbital decompression is hardly ever necessary due to the mild nature of the disease, while retrobulbar irradiation, which has been proved beneficial in adults, has no place in the treatment of juvenile GO, in view of the theoretical risk of tumor induction.

No real new treatment has been developed in the last decade for thyroid eye disease (TED). Glucocorticoids (GC), orbital radiotherapy (OR) or a combination of both, are most frequently used in the treatment of TED for the iv immunosuppressive effects. However, we now have novel information regarding the when and how corticosteroids should be used. In general, the iv route of GC administration is preferable to the oral use. iv GC should be used at much lower doses than previously (4.5 to 6 g cumulative dose), possibly with a small dose of oral prednisone (or equivalent) in the interpulse period and for a few weeks after completion of iv treatment. Careful assessment of patients before treatment for identification of possible risk factors of liver toxicity is mandatory. Finally, monitoring of patients, particularly for liver function, is warranted during and after treatment. Although OR's effectiveness was disputed by a study few years ago, more recent studies have reconfirmed its beneficial role in TED and shown that it still has a positive role to play in patients with active TED. Finally, although Somatostatin-analogs (SM-as) gave the impression some years ago that might represent an effective weapon for TED management and initial, mostly uncontrolled and non-randomized trials with small number of patients supported this notion, newer randomized, double-blind studies with larger number of patients have not confirmed the first optimistic results. The question after that is if SM-as should be considered as a rubber bullet in the treatment of TED and we have to forget about them. The answer should be "no yet," especially in the light that the role of SM-as may be revitalized by the use of analogs with higher affinity for all somatostatin receptors subtypes. Such analogs are now available and under investigation in different diseases with very promising results.

Meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD) is the most frequent cause of dry eye disease (DED). Eyelid inflammation, microbial growth, associated skin disorders as well as potentially severe corneal complications culminate to make MGD a complex multifactorial disorder. It is probable that MGD is a heterogeneous condition arising from any combination of the following five separate pathophysiological mechanisms: eyelid inflammation, conjunctival inflammation, corneal damage, microbiological changes and DED resulting from tear film instability. The pathogenesis of both MGD and DED can be described in terms of a 'vicious circle': the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of DED and MGD interact, resulting in a double vicious circle. The MGD vicious circle is self-stimulated by microbiological changes, which results in increased melting temperature of meibum and subsequent meibomian gland blockage, reinforcing the vicious circle of MGD. Meibomian gland blockage, dropout and inflammatio...

Entropion is a condition in which the eyelid margin turns in against the eyeball. The involutional or senile type of entropion is one of the most common lower lid malpositions in the elderly. The interventions described and currently used for the treatment of this condition are surgical in nature, although non-surgical temporary medical treatment for the early stages of entropion has also been reported. The relative effectiveness of these interventions has not yet been resolved. The purpose of this review is to examine the effect of interventions for involutional entropion and to assess whether any method is superior to the others. We searched the Cochrane Controlled Trials Register - CENTRAL/CCTR, which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group specialised register (Cochrane Library Issue 3, 2000), MEDLINE (1966 to October 2000), EMBASE (1980 to September 2000), the metaRegister of Controlled Trials (mRCT), oculoplastic textbooks, conference proceedings and bibliographies of relevant reports. We contacted investigators and experts in the field for details of other published and unpublished studies. The criteria for including studies in this review were randomised controlled trials where one intervention for involutional lower lid entropion has been compared to another method of treatment in people older than 60 years of age with involutional lower lid entropion. Both reviewers assessed the search results according to the criteria for including studies in the review. No studies were found that met these criteria, and therefore no data were collected and no meta-analysis was performed. Since no studies met our selection criteria no results were produced. No conclusions could be reached about the effectiveness of interventions for involutional lower lid entropion, although retrospective case series studies suggest that some forms of treatment may be associated with higher recurrence rates than others. Lack of suitable data highlights the need for randomised controlled trials in the fields of entropion management.

Orbital decompression is an established procedure for the management of exophthalmos and visual rehabilitation from optic neuropathy in cases of thyroid eye disease. Numerous procedures for removal of orbital bony wall, fat or a combination of these for a variety of indications in different stages of the disease have been well reported in the medical literature. However, the relative effectiveness and safety of these procedures in relation to the various indications remains unclear. To review current published evidence for the effectiveness of surgical orbital decompression for disfiguring proptosis in adult thyroid eye disease and summa rise information on possible complications and the quality of life from the studies identified. We searched CENTRAL (which contains the Cochrane Eyes and Vision Group Trials Register) (The Cochrane Library 2011, Issue 10), MEDLINE (January 1950 to October 2011), EMBASE (January 1980 to October 2011), the metaRegister of Controlled Trials (mRCT) (www.controlled-trials.com) and ClinicalTrials.gov (http://clinicaltrials.gov). There were no date or language restrictions in the electronic searches for trials. The electronic databases were last searched on 6 October 2011. We searched oculoplastic textbooks, conference proceedings from the European and American Society of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (ESOPRS, ASOPRS), European Ophthalmological Society (SOE), the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) and American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) for the years 2000 to 2009 to identify relevant data. We attempted to contact researchers who are active in this field for information about further published or unpublished studies. We included randomised controlled trials (RCTs) with no restriction on date or language comparing two or more surgical methods for orbital decompression with removal of bony wall, orbital fat or a combination of both for disfiguring proptosis or comparison of surgical techniques with any form of medical decompression. Each review author independently assessed study abstracts identified from the electronic and manual searches. Author analysis was then compared and full papers for appropriate studies were obtained according to the inclusion criteria. Disagreements between the authors were resolved by discussion. We identified two randomised trials eligible for inclusion in the review. There was significant variability between the trials for interventions, methodology and outcome measures and therefore meta-analysis was not performed. One study suggested that the transantral approach and endoscopic transnasal technique had similar effects in reducing exophthalmos but that the endoscopic approach may be safer, relating to fewer complications. This study had short-term follow-up and lacked information on our primary outcome (success or failure of treatment). The second study provided evidence that intravenous steroids may be superior to primary surgical decompression in the management of compressive optic neuropathy requiring less secondary surgical procedures, although it relates more frequently to transient side effects. This study was weakened by a small sample size. Until more credible evidence is available recommendations as to best treatment cannot be reliably made. A single study showed that the transantral approach for orbital decompression was related to more complications than the endoscopic transnasal technique which is preferred by Ear, Nose and Throat (ENT) surgeons, usually as an adjunctive procedure. Intravenous steroids were reported in a single trial to be the most efficient intervention for dysthyroid optic neuropathy. The majority of published literature on orbital decompression for thyroid eye disease consists of retrospective, cohort, or case series studies. Although these provide useful descriptive information, clarification is required to show the relative effectiveness of each intervention for various indications.The two RCTs reviewed are not robust enough to provide credible evidence to our understanding of current decompressive surgery and to support recommendations for clinical practice. There is evidence from currently available uncontrolled studies that removal of the medial and lateral wall (balanced decompression) with or without fat removal may be the most effective surgical method related to only a few complications.There is a clear need for randomised studies evaluating the balanced two-wall, three-wall and orbital fat decompression techniques. Comparison with other surgical techniques for orbital decompression or with immunosuppression in cases of compressive optic neuropathy would also be important. These studies should primarily address the reduction of exophthalmos, disease severity, complication rates, quality of life and cost of the intervention.

The study compares the use of Jones' retractor plication and the Wies procedure as a primary procedure for the repair of involutional lower lid entropion in the absence of horizontal lid shortening. Retrospective case series comparison. One hundred two cases with at least 6 months follow-up after primary surgery for involutional lower lid entropion performed between 1993 and 1996. Two groups were compared: Jones' retractor plication was performed in one group and the Wies procedure in the other; neither group had horizontal shortening of the lower eyelid. The rates of cure, recurrence, and overcorrection of the lower lid entropion. Jones' retractor plication was performed in 37 (36%) patients and the Wies procedure in 65 (64%). Two of the 37 (5%) Jones cases had recurrent entropion develop, both at 31 months after surgery, compared with 1 1 of 65 (17%) recurrences after the Wies procedure (P = 0.81); recurrence after Wies procedure was earlier, at a median of 6 months after surgery. There were 20 of 65 (31 %) overcorrections after the Wies procedure and 4 of 37 (11 %) after the Jones procedure (P < 0.02); one quarter of each group required secondary repair of the overcorrection (5 of 20 after failed Wies procedure; 25% after failed Jones procedure). Overall, there were 6 of 37 (16%) unsatisfactory results after the Jones procedure in contrast to 31 of 65 (48%) after the Wies procedure (P < 0.001). These data provide strong evidence (P < 0.001) that, in the absence of horizontal shortening of the lower eyelid, a successful outcome is more likely after Jones retractor plication than after the Wies procedure.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the use of the Holmium YAG laser in the endoscopic placement of Lester Jones tubes in patients with a blocked canaliculus or failed lacrimal pump function. Sixteen cases with a non-functional canaliculus were included over a one-year period. Following caruncle excision, a 19 G needle is inserted through the medial canthal tissues into the nasal space. Nasal endoscopy confirms the accurate positioning in relation to the nasal anatomy. With the Holmium YAG laser, a tissue channel is fashioned around the guide needle through the structures of the lateral nasal wall to facilitate an accurate and secure placement of the Jones tube. The endoscopic, laser-assisted placement reduces the operating time to less than 20 minutes, minimizes tissue trauma and does not require the initial surgical steps of an open DCR procedure. There were 14 cases (87.5%) with securely retained tubes and two cases (12.5%) that required tube replacement. The advantage of the procedure is especially great in revision surgery where the ostium is opened through scar tissue. Nasal endoscopy with the assistance of the Holmium YAG laser offers simplicity and precision in the placement of Jones tubes. It minimizes tissue trauma and increases the surgical success rate.

To evaluate 24-hour intraocular pressure (IOP) efficacy of latanoprost versus travoprost, each given every evening, in exfoliative glaucoma patients. Prospective, observer-masked, crossover comparison. Forty patients with exfoliation glaucoma. Patients with a pressure of >24 mmHg were randomized to latanoprost or travoprost for an 8-week treatment period after a 6-week medicine-free period. Patients were then switched to the opposite treatment for the second period. At untreated baseline and at the end of each treatment period the IOP was measured at 6 am, 10 am, 2 pm, 6 pm, 10 pm, and 2 am. Diurnal IOP. The mean 24-hour IOP was 25.1+/-2.5 mmHg at baseline, 17.8+/-2.1 mmHg on latanoprost, and 17.3+/-2.2 mmHg on travoprost (P = 0.001). Individual time points were similar between treatments, except at 6 pm when travoprost provided lower IOP (16.7+/-2.6 vs 17.9+/-2.5 mmHg, P<0.001). Adverse events showed more conjunctival hyperemia with travoprost (n = 15) than latanoprost (n = 6; P = 0.03). Latanoprost and travoprost both significantly reduce the 24-hour IOP from baseline in exfoliative glaucoma, but travoprost may demonstrate a greater hypotensive efficacy in the late afternoon.