Eye Inflammation
What Is Eye Inflammation?
Eye inflammation most commonly occurs in response to infection, allergy, surgery or trauma (i.e., blow to the eye, foreign body, chemical injury). It is important to control the duration and severity of inflammation and avoid scarring, as even a small amount of scarring in eye tissue can lead to irreversible vision impairment.
An eye inflammatory response is a generalized reaction to stimuli that typically fall into two classes: foreign substances such as bacteria or allergens or injuries to the eye tissue caused by trauma or surgery.
What Are the Symptoms of Eye Inflammation?
The signs and symptoms of inflammation are swelling, pain, heat and redness, caused by increased blood flow to the injured area.
Who Does Eye Inflammation Affect?
Although inflammatory reactions commonly occur as part of the body's response to bacterial or viral infection, inflammation can also occur in the absence of infection. Allergens such as pollen, house dust or insect stings may provoke inflammation.
Eye surgery is another, and perhaps the most common, cause of eye inflammation. Physicians naturally expect their patients to suffer eye inflammation as a direct result of eye surgery and, as such, treat their patients in advance for this outcome.
How to Avoid Eye Inflammation
Many of the same preventative measures taken to avoid eye allergies and infections, can be taken to avoid eye inflammation:
- Prior to and following eye surgery, take prescribed anti-inflammatory medication.
- Wash your hands before and after touching your eyes or face and before and after using medicine in your eyes.
- Do not share eye makeup.
- Avoid allergens.
- Do not share contact lens equipment, containers, or solutions.
- Do not wear contact lenses until the inflammation is resolved. Thoroughly clean your contacts before wearing them again.
- Do not share eye medicine.
How Is Eye Inflammation Treated?
Ideally, the eye's inflammatory response will allow regeneration of tissue exactly as it was before the injury, but it is much more likely that the eye will try and heal itself by building scar tissue. It's important to help eye tissue regenerate rather than form scar tissue, as scar tissue on the cornea can result in vision loss.
Topical creams or oral anti-inflammatory medications are used to treat inflammation and associated symptoms caused by surgery, allergy, trauma, or other infectious processes. The types of inflammatory drugs most often used to suppress inflammation are nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and corticosteroids. NSAIDs are sometimes referred to as aspirin-like drugs, and corticosteroids are a class of steroids used to control inflammation.
Because systemic corticosteroid therapy carries some risk of side effects and toxicity, topical non-steroid therapy is preferred when possible.
Alcon manufactures and sells Nevanac® ophthalmic suspension, an NSAID used to treat eye pain and inflammation often associated with eye surgery. Learn more about this treatment and other Alcon pharmaceutical products.
