Corneal Guttata

In the December 2022 edition of the journal Cornea, Silvana Schonit and colleagues published an article showing that corneal guttata are transplanted in about 15% of penetrating keratoplasty grafts.

What the heck does that mean? Penetrating keratoplasty grafts are full thickness cornea transplants. In an idealized world, cornea transplants are always perfect pristine tissue samples that replace dysfunctional corneas. Schonit’s paper showed that, in their study, 15% of tissue samples had corneal guttata. That indicates that the inner portion of the cornea tissue was not completely normal in that 15% of cases. However, the authors also noted that most of the cases of grafts containing corneal guttata only had low grade guttata.