Abstract
Purpose :
There are two techniques for the preservation of corneas: preservation with non-enucleated eyes - extraction of the cornea directly from the corpse, also called in situ -, and enucleated eyes - extraction of the cornea through an enucleated globe. The purpose of this study was to perform a long-term comparison of the quality of corneas preserved from enucleated and non-enucleated eyes in order to evaluate if the preservation method interferes with the quality and final classification of the corneas.
Methods :
A cross-sectional, non-interventional study was carried out with medical records from donors of 4.542 corneas collected by the Ocular Tissue Bank of Santa Casa of São Paulo from July 2008 to December 2016. We excluded data from corneas submitted for anatomopathological analysis. National quality scoring of the optical and tectonic grafts was analyzed using its variables: epithelial exposure, epithelial defect, stromal edema, stromal striae, Descemet fold and specular reflex; the higher the score value, the worse the quality of the cornea in the analyzed variable. The results obtained in the study were expressed by means and standard deviations. The Mann-Whitney test was used with significance values of p<0.05 for statistical evaluation (Instat®, Graphpad, v 3.0).
Results :
Among the optical grafts, we observed a statistically significant difference between the quality of corneas preserved from enucleated and non-enucleated eyes in the following subjects: epithelial exposure (p=0.011), epithelial defect (p=0.017), Descemet fold (p=0.048) and stromal striae (p=0.036). There was no statistically significant difference in the other items.
Conclusions :
For corneas with viability for optical transplantation, corneas preserved by non-enucleation method (in situ) have better quality when compared with those preserved by enucleation.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2018 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Honolulu, Hawaii, April 29 - May 3, 2018.