Evaluation of the Inflammatory Cytokines Expression Level on Ocular Surface in Office Workers; the Osaka Study

Abstract

Purpose : Dry eye disease (DED) is thought as one of ocular inflammation diseases, and anti-inflammatory is the major treatment among the world. The aim of this study was to compare the inflammation level on ocular surface with DED and normal condition. We evaluated inflammatory cytokine mRNA level in the three groups; definite DED, possible DED, and non-DED using Japanese dry eye disease criteria.

Methods : One hundred ninety-six eyes of 95 volunteers (59 males and 36 females) were recruited in this study. All subjects were required to fill in dry eye questionnaires, in addition to ocular surface evaluation including lissamine green vital staining, tear break up time (TBUT) and the Schirmer test. Conjunctival epithelium was obtained by impression cytology. The isolated total RNA from impression cytology samples was used to analyze the inflammatory gene expression using quantitative real-time PCR.

Results : In this study, nine subjects (9.5%) were diagnosed as definite DED, fifty-six (58.9%) were probable DED, along with thirty- (31.6%) non-DED subjects. Keratoconjunctival staining score was 3.1±1.8 in definite DED, 0.7±1.0 in probable DED, and 0.4±0.7 in non-DED. The fluorescein staining score with definite DED showed significant increase compared to non-DED(P<0.001). Compared with non DED subjects, conjunctival impression cytology samples in definite DED have shown that 3.5 times higher mRNA expression level of TNFα and 10.0 times in INFγ (p=0.015 and P=0.042, respectively)．However, in probable DED, we did not observe any significant increase in inflammatory cytokines level.

Conclusions : Compared to non-DED, definite DED patients with severe epithelial defects had significant higher inflammatory cytokine expression level. There was no significant increase in inflammatory cytokine level with probable DED.

This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2017 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Baltimore, MD, May 7-11, 2017.