The Intraocular Penetration of Ampicillin, Methicillin, and Oxacillin

Intravitreal vancomycin and amikacin versus intravenous imipenem in the treatment of experimental Staphylococcus aureus endophthalmitis

“…The use of IV antibiotics remains controversial, primarily because the majority of antibiotics do not achieve therapeutic levels in the vitreous, even in inflamed aphakic eyes in which increased vascular permeability allows for better penetration [2,4,8,13,23,24,25,28,29,20]. The few exceptions to that rule are ciprofloxacin [10], cefazolin [17], ceftazidime [2], vancomycin [1,18], and imipenem [3], which have been demonstrated to achieve adequate levels in animal models of aphakic inflamed eyes.…”

“…A number of ophthalmologists advocate the use of systemic antibiotics to treat those cases of presumptive endophthalmitis. However, most antibiotics penetrate only poorly into the vitreous if given topically or systemically [2,4,8,13,23,24,25,28,29,20] and are therefore not effective in the treatment of bacterial endophthalmitis.…”

Intravenous treatment of experimental Staphylococcus aureus endophthalmitis: imipenem versus the combination of ceftazidime and amikacin

“…The theoretical advantages of IV antibiotics are the ability to maintain a relatively constant therapeutic level of the antibiotics while inducing minimal retinal toxicity. However, the majority of antibiotics do not penetrate adequately into the vitreous, even in inflamed aphakic eyes [24,4,25]. Only ciprofloxacin [9], cefazolin [16], CAZ [2], and vancomycin [17] have been shown to achieve therapeutic levels in animal models of aphakic inflamed eyes.…”

Ampicillin Penetration Into the Rabbit Eye

“…Despite some conflicting reports (Furgiuele 1964;Records & Ellis 1967), ampicillin administered systemically sufficiently penetrated the blood-aqueous barrier to be used in susceptible grampositive infections of the anterior segment of the eye ; Records 1967; Goldman et al 1968; Goldman & Klein 1970).…”