Journal of Ophthalmology
Volume 2015 (2015), Article ID 541512, 1 page
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/541512

Letter to the Editor

Comment on “The Ocular Surface Chemical Burns”

Abdullah Ilhan¹ and Umit Yolcu²

¹Ophthalmology Department, Erzurum Military Hospital, 25020 Erzurum, Turkey
²Ophthalmology Department, Sarikamis Military Hospital, 36500 Kars, Turkey

Received 12 October 2014; Accepted 19 January 2015

Academic Editor: Tamer A. Macky

Copyright © 2015 Abdullah Ilhan and Umit Yolcu. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

We have read the paper entitled “The Ocular Surface Chemical Burns” by M. Eslani et al. with great interest [1]. We congratulate the authors that they composed a thorough review with precious pearls and would like to make a contribution.

In case of a chemical injury, if stromal nerve endings get seriously harmed, sensation and pain could be reduced. This would be in contradiction with the severity of the injury and might mislead the physician. Furthermore, while examining such a patient, physicians ought to avoid phenylephrine drops due to the increased risk of ischemia.

The authors warn us about lime injuries for the risk of ongoing damage if they are trapped in the deep fornixes. Meanwhile, there is a positive feature of lime injuries that their damage is restricted by the formation of calcium soaps that precipitate and prevent deeper penetration [2]. Another circumstance mentioned in the text is the combined injuries like exploding car batteries. Firework injuries also need to be handled cautiously because fireworks contain magnesium hydroxide which may cause a combined chemical and thermal injury.

Conflict of Interests

None of the authors has conflict of interests with the submission.

References

M. Eslani, A. Baradaran-Rafii, A. Movahedan, and A. R. Djalilian, “The ocular surface chemical burns,” Journal of Ophthalmology, vol. 2014, Article ID 196827, 9 pages, 2014.

M. D. Wagoner, “Chemical injuries of the eye: current concepts in pathophysiology and therapy,” Survey of Ophthalmology, vol. 41, no. 4, pp. 275–313, 1997.