Purpose:
To determine the level of nitric oxide metabolites in tears of patients with acute infectious conjuctivitis comparing to tears of healthy volunteers.
Methods:
Patients with clinical diagnosis of acute viral conjunctivitis and healthy volunteers (control group) were invited to participate. Viral infectious conjunctivitis was characterized by early symptoms like redness, eye irritation and watering and signs like hiperemia and exuberant folicular reaction. Under slit lamp visualization, 0.5ml of tears from patients presenting acute conjunctivitis and from normal volunteers were collected by capillaroscopy (Figure). The level of nitric oxide metabolites (nitrite and nitrate) was determined by spectrophotometry and compared between both groups using the Independent-Sample T test.
Conclusions:
In the studied sample there was a higher nitric oxide metabolites levels in tears from infectious conjunctivitis subjects than in healthy ones. Increasing the sample size could better evaluate nitric oxide metabolites levels differences.
Keywords: conjunctivitis • nitric oxide • inflammation