Prevent Blindness Offers New Educational Resources on Uveitis and Keratitis for Rare Disease Day

In observance of Rare Disease Day on Feb. 29, 2020, Prevent Blindness, the nation’s oldest volunteer eye health organization, is offering educational resources on uveitis, an inflammatory eye disease. Uveitis is a general term describing a group of inflammatory diseases that produces swelling and destroys eye tissues in the uvea (the middle layer of the eye that contains most blood vessels), according to the National Eye Institute. Uveitis is caused by an eye injury or surgery, an infection, autoimmune diseases or systemic inflammatory disorders that affect the whole body, or the cause can be unknown.

In addition, Prevent Blindness offers a new patient education resource dedicated to keratitis, an inflammation of the cornea. The cornea is the clear, protective outer layer of the eye.

Prevent Blindness offers dedicated web pages at http://www.preventblindness.org/uveitis and http://www.PreventBlindness.org/keratitis, as well as a new educational video. Downloadable fact sheets are also available, including, “Uveitis Causes,” “Uveitis Facts,” “Uveitis Patient Guide,” and “Keratitis.” Development of these new resources was supported by a grant from Mallinckrodt Pharmaceuticals.

Without early detection and treatment, inflammatory eye diseases can lead to permanent vision loss. The prevalence of inflammatory eye diseases can vary based on the type and cause of the condition. Uveitis causes about 30,000 new cases of legal blindness annually in the United States and accounts for about 10–15 percent of all cases of total blindness in the country.

Source: Prevent Blindness