Transcript
Announcer:
Welcome to Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Steven Yeh, who’s the Stanley M. Truhlsen Junior Chair of Ophthalmology and the Director of Retina and Uveitis at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine. He’ll be discussing current and emerging challenges and research areas in uveitis management. Let’s hear from Dr. Yeh now.
Dr. Yeh:
There are ongoing unmet needs, challenges, and areas for future research that our group and others have continued to work on. I think within the realm of uveitis, if you look at large epidemiological data, we still see that up to 40 percent of patients with uveitis actually have unclear etiology. And that can be very frustrating both for patients and physicians alike. So I think that as we move forward, one of the unmet needs is actually helping to resolve these causes “idiopathic” or undifferentiated uveitis. I think that's where metagenomics, unbiased sequencing, and further diagnostics will really come into play.
As we think about retinal inflammation, I think that one of the other unmet needs and ongoing challenges is, as we think about the retinal diseases of substantial public health impact—diabetes and macular degeneration, both dry and wet—we ask ourselves: where is the inflammation? Can this also be targeted in addition to vascular endothelial growth factor? We're already seeing it in the field of geographic atrophy with these anticomplement inhibitors, which are part of the inflammatory pathway. So I think we're going to continue to see this intersection between treating retinal inflammation for these diseases of public health consequence and also some intersect with what we see in the field of uveitis.
As we think about the landscape of uveitis, I think it's important to recognize that there are an increasing number of pathogens that can lead to infectious eye disease. One of the areas that our group and others have looked at is related to Ebola virus disease and how it can lead to a high rate of uveitis. We see this predominantly in Western Africa, but we've also seen this in Central Africa as well. Especially with the recent Ebola outbreak in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, I think it's important to have this on the radar. There's also an ongoing mpox outbreak that can also lead to severe keratitis. We know that Hantavirus has also been reported to lead to uveitis in select populations previously.
So ultimately, we're going to need to understand the different pathogens that are both emerging and potentially dangerous and understand where these pathogens may ultimately lead to eye disease. I think that's certainly an area that we need to understand, and the landscape of uveitis is certainly changing and evolving and an area of important future research.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Steven Yeh talking about how we can address unmet needs in uveitis care. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
