Assessment of Clinical Outcome Following Therapeutic Penetrating Keratoplasty in Non-Healing Infective and Perforated Corneal Ulcer

Abstract

BACKGROUND Corneal blindness has been a significant visual disability in developing countries like India. Corneal ulcer contributes mainly as the leading cause for monocular blindness. Considering the common condition, the studies and literature have been surprisingly less when it comes to corneal ulcer and their management. But with the advent of therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty (TPK), the scenario and prevalence of corneal blindness can be reduced. Hence this study was done to know the importance of therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty in case of non-healing infective and perforated corneal ulcers. The objectives were to assess the clinical outcome in a non-healing and perforated corneal ulcer, reduction in symptoms and signs of infection, anatomical or structural integrity of the globe and also evaluate the visual outcome following therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty. METHODS Data were obtained from 30 patients operated at our institute for therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty. Patients with less than one year of follow up, paediatric cases, PL negative cases were excluded. The outcome was assessed based on maintenance of structural integrity, reduction in infective load, improvement in visual acuity and graft survival and its correlation with corneal vascularisation, previously failed grafts, donor tissue quality, graft size and type of surgery. RESULTS Structural integrity was maintained in 93.3 % of the cases, reduction of infective load in 90 % of cases and optically clear grafts in 46.7 % of cases and vision was better than 6/60 in 30 % of cases. CONCLUSIONS The study proved that in the case of non-healing and perforated corneal ulcers, therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty had a good prognosis in reducing infective load, maintaining structural integrity without which eye could have been lost. KEYWORDS Therapeutic Penetrating keratoplasty, Perforated corneal ulcer, non-healing corneal ulcer, corneal blindness, TPK