Optical coherence tomography findings in a case of chronic welder's maculopathy

Three-dimensional spectral domain optical coherence tomography in chronic exposure to welding arc

“…Choi et al 6 reported acute welding arc injury with diminution of vision without any retinal changes on SD-OCT. Vedantham7 reported, in chronic welder arc exposure, presence of a hyporeflective space between the two retinal outer hyper-reflective layers.…”

Reversible structural disruption of the outer retina in acute welding maculopathy

“…2,3 In aphakia, as in our case, wider spectrum of waves, and in particular damaging short wavelength radiation, may gain access to the retina and exacerbate the damage.…”

“…The damage is thought to stem from photochemical injury to the photoreceptors. 1,2 We report the correlation of clinical and optical coherence tomography (OCT) findings in a case of acute welding maculopathy.…”

“…5 Recent OCT findings in a report on chronic welding maculopathy documented permanent disruption of the foveal outer segment. 2 Histopathologic studies of chronic solar maculopathy have demonstrated that most of the disruption occurs mainly in the pigment epithelium and outer segments of the photoreceptors. 6,7 An interesting speculation based on OCT findings in our case and in acute solar maculopathy is that acute photochemical injury may lead to reversible perturbation in photoreceptor outer segment renewal process.…”

“…[2][3][4] Anyway, as suggested by Dr Shah et al, we reanalysed the data by collapsing the data into individuals and analysed using Wilcoxon's test (a nonparametric test). The differences of visual field indexes between OSA and control arms were still found to be statistically significant (P ¼ 0.021 for the difference between mean deviation in the two arms, and P ¼ 0.001 for the difference between pattern standard deviation in the two arms, respectively).…”