Abstract
Purpose:
Dry eye disease is becoming recognized as an immune inflammation mediated disorder. Surgical insults such as corneal incisions or suture can aggravate dry eye. We compared the inflammatory infiltration, hemangiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis of cornea which was induced by surgical insults in both dry eye and non- dry eye.
Methods:
We used two groups, one, normal eye (non-dry eye) and the other, an induced dry eye model. We first compared the corneas of both groups before surgery with confocal microscopy. In non-dry (normal) and dry eye model, we made a corneal incision, and applied two corneal sutures to approximate the wound. After harvesting the cornea on postoperative day 9 and immunohistochemical staining, we compared the corneal neovascularization (NV), lymphangiogenesis (LY) and CD11b+ inflammatory cell infiltration between the non-dry eye and dry eye groups
Results:
In corneas on which no surgery was done, dry eyes showed more CD11b+ cell infiltration than non-dry eye (p<0.05). In the corneas after corneal injury, there was significantly more hemangiogenesis, lymphangiogenesis, and inflammatory infiltration in the dry eye group than in the non-dry eye group (all p’s<0.05).
Conclusions:
The status of the cornea, whether it is dry or not, is highly critical to the development of NV, LY and inflammation after corneal injury. Dry eye can induce more postoperative neovascularization, lymphangiogenesis and inflammation than non-dry eye.
Keywords: 480 cornea: basic science •
557 inflammation •
486 cornea: tears/tear film/dry eye