This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Cause of endothelial cell loss in corneal graft may be immunologic

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

The underlying cause of chronic endothelial cell loss in post-keratoplasty patients may be immunologic, according to German researchers.

Thomas Reinhard, MD, and colleagues at Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg divided a homogenous group of 223 normal-risk keratoplasty patients into six groups with different degrees of human leukocyte antigen (HLA) matching. Group 1 had unknown HLA data, group 2 had up to two mismatches, group 3 had three mismatches, group 4 four mismatches, group 5 five mismatches and group 6 six mismatches on the HLA A, B or DR loci. Only patients with at least three postoperative endothelial cell density values were included in the study.

No statistically significant differences were found among the six groups.

The authors noted that previous work has shown that proper HLA matching is a suitable means to reduce identifiable immune reactions and to prolong graft survival even in normal-risk keratoplasty patients. Those same HLA matching procedures, however, are not effective in reducing the extent of chronic endothelial cell loss, they said.

The study is published in the February issue of Acta Ophthalmologica Scandinavica.