Clinical characterisation and cytological study of dry eye in patients with autoimmune disease.

Objective: To assess the clinical characteristics and changes in ocular surface cytology of dry eye in patients with systemic autoimmune disease.

Methods: The case-control study was conducted in the Second Hospital of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, China, from February 2016 to January 2017, and comprised systemic autoimmune disease patients and healthy controls. Schirmer's I test, tear breakup time test, and fluorescein staining were performed on all subjects. Both groups were evaluated for dry eye with the current diagnostic criteria. Conjunctival impression cytology and the morphology of epithelial cells were observed in both groups of subjects. Flow cytometry was used to identify the amount of apoptosis. SPSS 15 was used to analyse the data.

Results: Each of the two groups had 60(50%) subjects each. The morbidity of dry eye in the control group was 17(28.3%), while it was 31(51.7%) in the patients (p<0.01). Among the patients with dry eye, the severity level of cells obtained by conjunctival impression sampling was significantly higher in patients than in controls (p<0.01). The percentage of conjunctival epithelial cells undergoing apoptosis was higher in patients with dry eye than in patients without dry eye in each group, and among patients with dry eye, the percentage of conjunctival epithelial cells undergoing apoptosis was higher in the patients than in controls (p<0.01 each).

Conclusions: The cell injury on the ocular surface was more serious in subjects with dry eye in systemic autoimmune disease than in subjects with dry eye in healthy controls.