Abstract
Purpose :
Behçet’s disease (BD) is a chronic, systemic, inflammatory disorder characterized by four major symptoms consisting of recurrent ocular, oral and genital ulcers, and skin lesions. Ocular involvement occurs in approximately 50-70% of patients with BD and repeated ocular attacks can cause blindness. Seasonal variation in ocular attack in patients with BD has been suggested in Japan since long before, however, there are very few studies which assessed the correlation between season and BD ocular attack. In this study, we retrospectively investigated the seasonal pattern of ocular attack of BD in a Japanese population.
Methods :
We enrolled a total of 145 Japanese patients with BD who were diagnosed and treated between March 1998 and November 2016 at the Uveitis Survey Clinic of Yokohama City University Hospital. The Rogers’ method was used to assess seasonal variation in ocular attack of BD.
Results :
A total of 830 ocular attacks occurred in the BD patients. The highest frequency of ocular attack was observed in November, followed by December and March. The lowest frequency was in the summer months of June, July and August. This seasonal variation in BD ocular attack was statistically significant (P < 0.05).
Conclusions :
We found that ocular attack of BD shows a significant seasonal variation in Japanese patients. This finding suggests that environmental factors associated with seasonality may be responsible for triggering ocular attack of BD.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.