Intraocular Gnathostomiasis: A rare Case Report of a Live Intravitreal Worm

Abstract

We report a rare case of intraocular gnathostomiasis from eastern India. A 32 year old male from Cuttack, Odisha presented to us with decreased vision in his left eye of counting fingers(CF) at 2 metres since 1 week without any pain, lid edema or periorbital swelling. Anterior segment was normal. Indirect ophthalmoscopy revealed a live motile worm in posterior vitreous cavity near macula. The worm was removed via pars plana vitrectomy. The removal was first attempted using flute needle but in vain and was finally done with end-grasping forceps. Microscopy revealed Gnathostoma spinigerum. The patient was treated with oral albendazole and steroids. The case is reported because of its rarity.

Larval Gnathostoma: morphological identification and probable source of a case of human eye infection in Assam, India

“…15] . Twenty-two corresponding human cases of gnathostomiasis recorded so far from India (Pillai et al, 2012;Rawat et al, 2016; Mohanty and Mahapatra, 2020) [16,17,18] since 1945 were due to G. spinigerum larva involving the eye in 20 cases and the rest with cutaneous involvement. In the Northeast region of India, out of 6 human cases under report, four cases of gnathostomiasis due to G. spinigerum have been reported from Assam (Barua et al, 2007;Bhattacharjee et al, 2007;Islam et al, 2011;Das et al, 2014) [3,19,20,21] and one each from the states of Meghalaya (Barua et al, 2007) [3] and Manipur (Mukherjee et al, 2012) [22] .…”