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What is Restasis?

Restasis eye drops offer a solution for tear film dysfunction, which can have many symptoms including blurred vision and pain. Restasis contains cyclosporine, an anti-inflammatory medication used in organ transplant rejection. Unlike artificial tears, Restasis works at the source of the problem by targeting the inflammation that disrupts tear production. By reducing inflammation, the eye’s…

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Steep Corneas

The very front part of the eye, the cornea, has a rounded dome-like shape. The curvature of the dome, i.e. how steep the cornea is, varies among the population. Girish Valluru and colleagues published an article in the June 2023 edition of the Journal Cornea that tried to correlate different measures of the overall human…

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Lisch Dystrophy

In the May 2023 edition of the journal Cornea, Mona Amer and colleagues published a case report about using 5-fluorouracil as a treatment for Lisch Dystrophy. Lisch Dystrophy is a problem with the cornea in which the outer portion of the cornea can become opacified with a whorl like pattern. In the past, most attempts…

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Amsler Grid

The Amsler Grid is a tool used by patients to possibly detect changes in the retina. It is literally a grid; obviously, a grid has lots of straight lines. Therefore, looking at a grid on a regular basis can reveal vision distortions. If the straight lines aren’t as straight as they are supposed to be,…

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ChatGPT and OphthoQuestions

In the June 2023 edition of JAMA Ophthalmology, Andrew Mihalache and colleagues published a study in which they assessed the success of ChatGPT in answering ophthalmology questions. The authors used text-based questions from the company OphthoQuestions and found that ChatGPT answered 46% of the questions correctly. The authors concluded that “ChatGPT … did not answer…

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Ruptured Eyeballs

“You’ll poke your eye out!” One of the most dreaded things that ophthalmologists see are injuries that create full thickness holes in the wall of the eyeball. We usually call these “open globe” injuries. Isaac Bleicher and colleagues published a study in the April 2023 issue of the journal Ophthalmology that re-affirmed and deepened knowledge…

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SMILE, cataract!

In the May 2023 edition of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Anouar Elotmani and colleagues published an article about calculating IOL power in patients who have had SMILE. Wait a minute, what is SMILE? SMILE is a technique of altering the cornea to change glasses prescription. Unlike the better known LASIK, there is…

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Eye injections and dry eye

Agni Malmin and colleagues published a study in the May 2023 edition of the journal Ophthalmology that was quite eye opening (if you’ll pardon the pun). They found that patients who had multiple injections in the eyeball had a REDUCED amount of the sorts of pathology associated with dry eye: they had less oil gland…

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A Fungus Among Us

In the March 2023 edition of the Journal JAMA Ophthalmology, S.W. Kim and colleagues published a report of cases of fungal endophthalmitis after cataract surgery in South Korea. Endophthalmitis is an infection inside of the eyeball, and, as the title suggests, the causes of the infections were fungi in these cases. Infections associated with cataract…

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Alcohol?

In the April 2023 edition of the journal Cornea, Ranit Karmakar and colleagues published a study regarding alcohol and endothelial cells. Endothelial cells are the cells on the inside of the cornea, which is the very front part of the eye (like a “windshield” over inner parts of the eye). These cells are responsible for…

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