Uveitis: Types

00:02 Welcome back.

00:04 We're going to continue on our hit parade of diseases of the eye by moving further and further back into the rest of the eye, in particular, the uvea.

00:16 Uveitis is going to be just inflammation of uvea.

00:18 So what is the uvea? Okay, here's a diagram of the eye.

00:22 The sclera you're all familiar with, that's the white connective tissue element.

00:26 The whites of the eyes, that forms an intact kind of sphere around the eyeball.

00:32 And we're going to be inside of that.

00:35 Inside of that the various layers are the choroid, which is going to be the vascularized component that's going to provide the nutrition and oxygenation for the retina and for the vitreous body, etc.

00:52 The ciliary body, the choroid and the iris constitute the uvea.

01:00 And they are actually all part and parcel of one big structure.

01:03 But clearly, as they encircled the eye, you can see that they can influence and affect pretty much every other structure of the eye.

01:12 So Uveitis is going to be inflammation of one or all of those components of the uvea- the iris, the ciliary body and the choroid.

01:23 It can also clearly affect the retina and the vitreous body so you can have something called Chorioretinitis or Vitritis as a consequence of uveitis.

01:34 As we go through the next set of slides, everything that's red is going to be one of those areas of the uvea or associated structures that are inflamed, and we're just going to go through the naming of some of the inflammation or inflammatory disorders that are associated with the uvea.

01:49 Okay? So there's the vitreous body in the middle, and we have the surrounding uvea identified here in a darker red.

01:58 Anterior uveitis is the most common form of uveitis and can be just Iritis involving the iris or can be Cyclitis just involving the ciliary body or can be Iridocyclitis which is both the iris and the ciliary body.

02:17 Pretty simple.

02:18 But I mean obviously bad diseases.

02:22 The Pars planitis or the pars plana is the connection between the ciliary body and the rest of the choroid.

02:28 And you can have just inflammation at that segment.

02:32 So that's indicated here in the darker red.

02:34 You can have vitritis as I told you earlier, which is inflammation associated with the vitreous humor there in the vitreous chamber.

02:42 You can have Choroiditis so that's just the choroid not the pars plana not the iris, not the ciliary body, but just the choroid is inflammed, Choroiditis.

02:53 You can have Chorioretinitis or retinochoroiditis depending on what you like, that can involve both the choroid and the retina.

03:02 You can have just retinitis, that is a consequence of inflammation that has been translocated into the retina.

03:09 And you can have Neuroretinitis involving both the retina and the optic nerve.

03:13 So depending on where the inflammation is, you have various names, we're going to treat them pretty much all the same, as we'll see at the end.

03:22 It's basically inflammation that may or may not have an infectious cause but we need to get rid of that inflammation before we get some serious damage and go blind.

03:32 So the treatments can be all the same but there may be different portions of the eye that are involved.