Severe Traumatic Intraocular Injuries Related to Blowout Fractures

ABSTRACT

PURPOSE: Blunt trauma can cause a wide range of ocular injuries. This study was performed to describe the prevalence of severe intraocular injuries (SIOI) and their correlation with the severity of blunt orbital trauma. METHODS: We retrospectively analyzed 117 eyes of 107 patients with orbital wall fractures who visited the emergency room at Konyang University Hospital from July 2006 to June 2008. Clinical features such as age, sex, causes of injury, revised trauma score (RTS), type of orbital wall fractures were recorded. The patients were divided into two groups blowout fracture with severe intraocular injuries (SIOI) and blowout fracture without SIOI. We compared the clinical and the injury-related characteristics between two groups and analyzed the SIOS-related factors. RESULTS: Among the 107 patients (117 eyes) with blowout fractures, 29 (27.1%) patients with 32 eyes (25.6%) had complicated severe intraocular injuries. Retrobulbar hemorrhage (14.5%), hyphema (13.7%), traumatic optic nerve injury (4.3%), and sustained loss of visual acuity (4.3%) were the most common SIOI disorders. A logistic regression analysis revealed that loss of visual acuity (odds ratio = 4.75) and eyeball motility disorder (odds ratio=7.61) were significantly associated with SIOS. CONCLUSION: We suggest that blowout fracture patients with loss of visual acuity or eyeball motility disorder are mostly likely to have severe intraocular injuries, so they need an ophthalmologic evaluation immediately.