Research Digest

Diet and DED.

Doctors at the University of Miami and the Veterans Administration undertook a cross-sectional to determine whether a Mediterranean diet was associated with dry eye disease.

The authors administered the Block Food Frequency Questionnaire to 247 men and examined them for DED. They also measured serum levels of vitamin D and submitted the questionnaire responses and biological data to latent class analysis.

The investigators found a positive association between Mediterranean diet and DED and with increased severity of disease. While vitamin D levels were not associated with the presence of DED, higher levels were associated with less severe symptoms.

The authors stated the presence of alcohol in Mediterranean diets might be responsible for the association between this diet and DED, or the patients might have begun eating in a healthier manner after receiving their diagnoses.

Type A behavior and glaucoma.

Having a type A personality has a significant impact on the presence and severity of open-angle glaucoma, according to a study by ophthalmologists in Italy.

The study team found that 17 women and 13 men, of the 50 total patients with OAG, had type A personalities, based on several psychological tests. In addition, type A patients had more significant visual field involvement, which was negatively correlated with one of the psychological tests — the Brief-cope scale.

The authors theorized that the frequent blood pressure fluctuations seen in type A subjects could be the underlying link between this personality type and OAG. They stated that personality studies are very important and should be incorporated into routine glaucoma screening and treatment.

Search behaviors in nystagmus.

To determine whether oculomotor control, crowding and attentional factors had any impact on visual searching in children with nystagmus, physicians in the Netherlands enrolled visually impaired children with and without nystagmus, as well as normal controls, in a clinical study.

Forty-eight children divided equally into three groups were subjected to three search conditions: a row with homogeneous distractors and matrices with either homogeneous or heterogeneous distractors.

With homogeneous distractors, the visually impaired children with nystagmus were less accurate in searching, and this decreased accuracy was even worse when distractors were heterogeneous.

The results of the study indicate that searching among heterogeneous distractors relies more heavily on oculomotor control. The authors concluded that increasing vertical line spacing in text could be helpful for visually impaired children.

Plateau iris configuration.

Based on the established association between plateau iris configuration (PIC) and angle closure in several Asian studies, as well as a higher rate of PACG among Chinese patients, ophthalmologists collaborating between centers in the United States and China compared the eyes of people of Chinese and Caucasian descent.

One hundred eleven Caucasian subjects and 226 Chinese subjects from both mainland China and the United States were submitted to ultrasound biomicroscopy and anterior-segment OCT.

While the authors found significant differences in angle recess area and iris thickness between races, the prevalence of PIC was not different. The authors could not more firmly establish a link between PIC and PACG, and they suspect other factors are more closely involved.

Dexamethasone implant in DME.

While anti-VEGF drugs seem to be effective in treating DME, some patients do not respond. To determine whether an intravitreal dexamethasone implant (Ozurdex, Allergan, Irvine, Calif.) would be helpful in such patients, retinal physicians in Croatia enrolled 16 eyes of 15 patients in a study.

In these patients, all of whom had not responded to treatment with three monthly doses of bevacizumab (Avastin, Genentech, South San Francisco, Calif.), the implant resulted in significant improvements in BCVA and central foveal thickness.

In addition, the study authors found that IOP levels, which tend to increase with steroid treatment, only increased slightly with the implant. As a result, the authors concluded that the dexamethasone implant could be an effective rescue for non-responders to anti-VEGF drugs. OM