PURPOSE Incisional or ablation injury to the corneal stroma is repaired by deposition of a fibrotic tissue produced by activated keratocytes, whereas cells lost from the underlying stroma after epithelial abrasion are simply replaced by keratocyte replication without expression of fibrotic markers. The purpose of this study was to investigate mechanisms that determine this differential keratocy...

The nature of the substrate that supports epithelial migration in vivo is of interest, particularly with respect to mechanisms of wound healing. Immunofluorescence and electron microscopy were used to search for common substrate components in prototype rabbit corneal wounds: epithelial scrape wounds, in which the corneal or conjunctival epithelium migrated over the denuded lamina densa of the c...

Greyish-white spots, varying in size, caused diagnostic problems in 2 patients with pre-invasive corneal carcinoma. Keratectomy specimens permitting light and electron microscopy indicated that the smaller spots predominating in one patient correlated with epithelial microcysts and vacuoles, while areas of parakeratosis accounted for the macroscopic white patches found in the other. A variety o...

Aims—To investigate if the amniotic membrane (AM) promotes epithelial migration while inhibiting stromal remodelling associated with corneal haze after excimer laser keratectomy. Methods—A wound 150 μm in depth and 6.0 mm in diameter was produced in 40 rabbits using an excimer laser. One eye was randomly chosen to be covered by the AM while the other eye served as a control. Epithelial wound he...

AIM To investigate causes and clinical findings of non-tuberculous mycobacterial keratitis, and to study its response to topical antibiotic therapy and surgical extirpative keratectomy. METHOD A single centre, retrospective review of 22 patients with non-tuberculous mycobacterial keratitis seen in a 3 year period. Laboratory diagnoses were established with Ziehl-Nielsen acid fast staining and...

Just when we thought photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) had achieved a level of safety and predictability in correcting refractive errors in our patients, new wounding healing information regarding apoptosis (programmed cell death) surfaces to show us that the way we remove the corneal epithelium matters a great deal in how the corneal stroma responds to our treatment.1 Excimer laser manufacture...

used as a substitute not only for epithelial cell proliferation, but also as a substrate for epithelial cells to attach to, and was transplanted permanently to repair a large intraoperative conjunctival defect and to form a filtering bleb. Meanwhile, an additional temporary AM transplantation was used to protect the primary AM transplantation until epithelialization was complete. Although repai...

PURPOSE Subepithelial haze is a frequent complication and is often the cause of regression after photorefractive keratectomy (PRK). The lack of understanding of this undesirable complication following PRK is in part due to the limited availability of suitable tissues for pathological studies. METHODS We examined the expression of various extracellular components in the cornea of a 46-year-old...

Human recombinant epidermal growth factor (hEGF) was evaluated in various corneal wound healing models in the rabbit. Human EGF accelerated epithelial wound healing in corneal reepithelialization, anterior-keratectomy, and alkali-burn models at concentrations of 10-500 micrograms/ml given four times daily (qid). In the corneal reepithelialization model, 100 micrograms/ml of hEGF qid produced a ...