[Incidence of endogenous uveitis at Kyushu University Hospital]

We performed a clinical statistical study on recent patients with endogenous uveitis at the clinic of the Department of Ophthalmology, Kyushu University Hospital.

We studied 616 patients with endogenous uveitis who first visited the clinic of the Department of Ophthalmology, Kyushu University Hospital, between January 1996 and December 2001.

The most frequent clinical entity was sarcoidosis (8.6%), followed by Behçet's disease (8.4%), Vogt-Koyanagi-Harada syndrome (6.5%), human T-lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-1) uveitis (3.9%), and toxoplasmosis (2.6%). Unclassified uveitis comprised 58.1% in our study. Next we classified the subjects into four age groups; adolescent (0-19 years old), young (20-39 years old), middle-aged (40-59 years old), and elderly (60-years old). We also classified the disease into four groups: uveitis pan, anterior, intermediate, and posterior uveitis, according to the site of inflammation. The most frequent clinical entity was Behçet's disease in the young group, and sarcoidosis in the elderly group. The frequency of unclassified uveitis was high in the adolescent and the elderly groups. As to the anatomic diagnosis of uveitis, panuveitis was most frequent, followed by anterior, posterior, and intermediate uveitis. Finally we investigated the frequency of secondary glaucoma. The frequency in all 616 patients was 19.7%. Secondary glaucoma was more frequent in male patients and more frequent in the middle-aged and the elderly groups.