Surgical management and outcomes of pediatric open globe injuries requiring vitrectomy.

Purpose: To describe surgical management and establish visual outcomes of open globe injury (OGI) in pediatric patients requiring vitrectomy.

Methods: Forty-eight eyes of 48 pediatric patients underwent vitrectomy for OGI with secondary vitreoretinal complications in the eye center of Jilin University were included. Characteristics of patients, details of ocular examination and operation, presenting and final visual acuity were recorded.

Results: Presenting visual acuity less than 20/400 was found in 44 eyes (91.7%), which included no light perception (NLP) in four eyes. At last visit, there was no eyes with visual acuity of NLP, and 19 eyes (39.6%) had a vision recovery to 20/400 or better. Mechanisms of injury, intraocular contents prolapse, presence of hyphema, intraocular foreign body, vitreous hemorrhage, retinal detachment, and total time from injury to PPV > 2 weeks were significant predictors of visual prognosis. Logistic regression analysis showed that hyphema was a significant predictive factor for poor visual outcome.

Conclusion: Visual acuity was improved in most of the patients with OGI in this study. Hyphema is an important presenting ocular sign in estimating the post-vitrectomy visual outcome for OGI in children. Proper timing of vitrectomy is suggested, and in this study patients may benefit more with early vitrectomy as less proliferative vitreoretinopathy (PVR) was found together with a better visual acuity.