Functional and morphological changes in the eyes of Behçet's patients with uveitis

Behçet's disease (BD) is a chronic, recurrent, multisystem disorder, and serious ocular involvement may lead to blindness. In some BD patients, latent tissue damage caused by recurrent ocular inflammation is not reflected by visual acuity or ophthalmoscopic findings. In this study, we evaluated the morphological and functional changes of ocular features related to duration of uveitis from onset in BD patients, and analysed their association with visual acuity.

Thirty-eight eyes of 20 patients with ocular BD were enrolled. Eyes with marked complications such as cataract, glaucoma, cystoid macular oedema, macular degeneration and optic atrophy were excluded from the study. During clinical remission of ocular inflammation, perimetric sensitivity and retinal thickness were measured by Micro Perimeter 1 (MP-1) and optical coherence tomography (OCT), respectively. The relationship between MP-1 and OCT findings, best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) converted to logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution (logMAR) and duration from initial onset of uveitis were analysed statistically.

logMAR correlated with perimetric sensitivity measured with MP-1 at the fovea, inner macula and outer macula, but not with retinal thickness based on OCT. The duration of uveitis correlated significantly with logMAR and with OCT-based retinal thickness at the fovea, inner macular and outer macula, but not with MP-1-derived retinal perimetric sensitivity. No correlation was found between OCT-based retinal thickness and the corresponding MP-1-derived retinal sensitivity at the fovea, inner macula or outer macula.

These results demonstrate that visual acuity, retinal perimetric sensitivity and retinal thickness decrease with an increase in the duration of uveitis in BD patients, but that retinal perimetric sensitivity is relatively preserved among these factors.