[Conjunctival granuloma following neglected thorn injury: about a case]

It is sometimes difficult to detect a plant intraocular foreign body, mostly in cases where the history of ocular trauma is unclear, or in patients who consult several months after the trauma. We report a rare case of a 7 year old child with self inflicted trauma of the the left eye by a cactus thorn 3 months before admission, which resulted in a temporal conjunctival granuloma with higher inflammatory reaction of the anterior segment. Surgical exploration was performed allowing the extraction of the thorn with total excision of the granuloma. A slight clinical improvement in visual acuity was observed, but the eyeball secondarily atrophied few months after extraction.