Abstract
Purpose :
To describe demographic data, etiology, treatment and complications of patients older than 60 years, attended in the uveitis and ocular immunology service in an ophthalmologic center in Mexico
Methods :
We analyzed fifteen years of data included in electronic database from patients attended in our service from January 2001 to October 2015.
We included medical records of all patients over 60 years old with any kind of ocular inflammation or uveal tract related diseases that were treated in our department.
We excluded patients who didn’t have proper follow-up, in whom the eye inflammatory disease was diagnosed prior to 60 years of age and those in which the diagnosis was unclear.
Results :
We attended 5000 patients in uveitis department, 1310 were older than 60 years in the first visit. Only 800 were included for the study. We divided them in three groups: autoimmune diseases (30.5%), infectious etiology (25.9%) and idiopathic (43.5%). The most common diagnosis included were non-granulomatous anterior uveitis (26%), herpetic keratouveitis (17%), scleritis (14%) and Pemphigoid (12%). Sixty-six percent of patients were women and 33% men. The systemic associations we found were diabetes mellitus in 24% of the patients, arterial hypertension in 38%, and rheumatoid arthritis in 12%. The average Intraocular pressure (IOP) was 14-14.5 in the first consult and 13.86-14.15 in the last one. Eighteen percent required some kind of ocular surgery, secondary to the inflammatory disease; the most common was phacoemulsification with Intraocular Lens implantation (55%). The average age was 71 years (range from 60-98 years).
Five percent of the patients studied developed some form of ocular hypertension or glaucoma secondary to the uveitis or the use of steroids.
Conclusions :
Even in the elderly the idiopathic causes of ocular inflammation are among the most common, as reported in other groups, none the less, autoimmune diseases play an important role in this age group.
The women had more overall cases of uveitis, yet this varied between the groups we studied, with the idiopathic diseases having the least men-women percentage difference (61% women) and the autoimmune diseases having the biggest one (78% women).
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.