Title of the article: Visual Outcome of Traumatic Corneal Laceration Repair in a Tertiary Eye Hospital, Nepal

Authors

  • Poonam Shrestha Assistant Professor, Nepal Eye Hospital,
  • Pratkshya Amatya, Ophthalmologist, Nepal Eye Hospital
  • Santosh Paudel Neapl Eye Hospital

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Corneal laceration leads to the development of corneal opacity which is a significant cause of corneal blindness. Primary surgical repair to restore the structural integrity of the globe as early as possible regardless of the extent of injury and presenting visual acuity is of great significance and challenging to both ophthalmologist and patient. The study aims to find out the visual outcome after traumatic corneal laceration repair in a tertiary center.

METHOD: The retrospective study was done where all the cases of traumatic corneal laceration repair were taken from September 2018 to August 2020. The factors studied were age and sex of the patient, visual acuity at the time of presentation, relative afferent pathway defect (RAPD), details of the object causing the injury, duration between injury and presentation in hospital, total extent of the wound, vitreous loss, iris prolapse, vitreous hemorrhage, presence or absence of retinal detachment, presence or absence of hyphaema and lens status. The visual acuity at 1 week and 12 week follow up visit after surgery was also studied.

RESULT: Out of the 31 patients, males were 25 (80.6%) and females were 6 (19.4%). The mean age was 43.61± 23.49 and the duration of presentation after injury was 1.72± 2.04. Most of the patients in our study had left eye involvement i.e 19 (61.3%) left eye and 12 (38.7%) right eye. Wooden stick (29.03%) was the common mode of injury in the study followed by metallic wire (19.35%) and plastic (12.9%) respectively. 64.5 % (20) patients had hyphaema at the time of presentation and 51.6% (16) iris prolapse, 38.7% (12) Lenticular damage, 25.8% (8) vitreous haemorrhage respectively. The visual acuity at presentation i.e before surgery was <3/60 in 58.06% of patient, <6/60 -3/60 in 19.35% of patients and ≥ 6/60 in 22.5% of patients respectively. The study also showed there was significant visual improvement from baseline to 1week and 12 week follow up visits.

CONCLUSION: Corneal laceration injury which is a type of open globe injury has a relative high incidence in tertiary referral center. Early and meticulous primary repair following injury results improvement in postoperative vision with positive correlation between pre-operative and post- operative visual outcome.

KEYWORDS: Cornea, laceration, repair, visual outcome

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Published

2023-01-07

Issue

Section

Orginal Articles