Kolkata Hospital Introduces Novel Treatment for Eye Patients

An eye hospital in Kolkata has introduced a new surgical method 'Auto blood Conjunctival Graft Fixation' to treat Pterygium patients with their blood. Pterygium is a wing-shaped fibro vascular tissue encroaching on to cornea from the nasal or temporal side causing visual disturbance, irritation and redness of eye.

"The idea of using natural blood clot as tissue adhesive is derived to provide the benefits of glue fixation to the patients minus drawbacks," said Santanu Mitra, senior consultant - cataract and occuloplasty services, Disha Eye Hospitals & Research center.

"Once the Pteryium is excised and the recipient bed is bare, a thin film of blood oozing in the surgical field is allowed to form clot over the area. Then the graft is harvested is aligned over the clotted blood. This is a 'no suture no glue' graft fixation technique," said Mitra.

Exposure to ultraviolet radiation, tropical atmosphere, excess outdoor exposure to sunlight and wind are some of factors behind the occurrence of this disease.

Various surgical procedures have been tried in the past but most of them have been discarded due to high recurrence rate or blinding side effects. Two of the most popular methods are grafting with healthy conjunctiva harvested from the other part of the eye and usage of fibrin glue for conjunctival graft fixation.

"But both the methods have some problems. The first one leaves behind symptoms like pain, redness of eye, watering and foreign body sensation. The fiber in glue is not readily available and carries the potential risk of disease transmission as it is derived from two clotting factors derived from human blood," Mitra said.

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He said due to the disadvantages of both the methods the procedure of 'Auto blood Conjunctival Graft Fixation' Surgery was invented.

Source-IANS