Twenty years of acanthamoeba keratitis.

Purpose: We described the rate of Acanthamoeba keratitis (AK) in a referral eye center in São Paulo, Brazil, through a retrospective review of clinical and laboratorial records of patients over 2 decades.

Methods: From 1987 to 2006, a total of 581 requests for amoebic laboratory workup in cases of infectious keratitis were investigated. Statistical analyses were applied to analyze a tendency of AK cases.

Results: Acanthamoeba species were cultured from corneal scrapings of 185 patients, 5 of them with bilateral infection. Eighty-three percent of those patients were related with contact lens wear.

Conclusions: The results suggested that patients with AK have persisted and increased over time at our ophthalmology center. Contact lenses showed to be a potential risk factor. Amoebic corneal infection can be considered as a new but well-established disease in Brazilian ophthalmology and visual sciences.