[The frosted retinal vascular branch syndrome]

In January 2002, thirty-eight years old healthy man with unusual clinical signs of vasculitis was examined in the Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Uveitis in our Department of Ophthalmology. The patient had a flu-like disease one month before the signs of the eye disease started. In the beginning of the disease, the visual acuity (VA) was 6/12 (20/40 or 0.5) for distance and Jaeger 8 for near and 6/6 (20/20 or 1.0) and Jaeger 1 respectively. The clinical appearance was similar to this of frosted branch angiitis. The thorough medical examination did not discover link between vasculitis and any systemic disease. Serologic examination discovered positivity of IgG immunoglobulin antibody against cytomegalovirus (CMV) only. The intraocular fluid sampling to confirm CMV antibody presence was denied by the patient. After starting the treatment with gancyclovirus and corticosteroids, the considerable improvement of clinical signs of the frosted branch angiitis was noticed. VA improved after five days of treatment. During one-year follow-up, neither recurrence of vasculitis nor the decline of VA of both eyes was marked. In Czech ophthalmologic literature, we did not find any article referring to frosted branch angiitis, so we took the liberty of offering the Czech term "syndrom omrzlých vĕtví retinálních cév".