Familial trigeminal anesthesia.

Familial congenital trigeminal anesthesia as an isolated abnormality is an unusual disorder. To our knowledge, only one family has previously been reported. We report here a family with three affected members demonstrating facial anesthesia, bilateral corneal changes, and nasal septal damage secondary to self-traumatization. Magnetic resonance imaging demonstrated hypoplasia of gasserian ganglia and trigeminal nerves in the affected father of two affected sons. The pathogenesis of this disorder appears to be congenital hypoplasia of the trigeminal nerves and gasserian ganglia that is inherited in a dominant fashion.

The effect of collagen shields on rabbit corneal reepithelialization after chemical debridement.

We evaluated the effect of precarved collagen lenses on the kinetics of epithelial wound healing in an experimental model of corneal erosions. After induction of anesthesia, central corneal erosions of 5-mm diameter were created in New Zealand white rabbits using n-heptanol. Animals were randomly assigned either to the treatment group or to one of three control groups. Each animal in the treatment group received a precarved collagen shield made from porcine sclera. Immediately after creation of the corneal epithelial defects, topical fluorescein sodium was applied, and the corneas were photographed. Similar follow-up examinations were conducted at 5, 24, 30, 48, 72, and 96 hr after defect creation. Epithelial defect areas were calculated by projecting the photographic slides onto a computerized digitizing pad. Reepithelialization kinetics were compared for the four treatment groups. When initial wound size was taken into account, no significant difference between mean reepithelialization rates was noted. These results indicate that collagen lenses do not adversely affect the speed of corneal reepithelialization, and may, because of their documented biodegradibility and drug delivery capability, be useful in the clinical management of corneal epithelial erosions.

Amniotic bands as a cause of ocular anomalies.

We examined nine patients with amniotic band syndrome who had systemic and ocular pathologic deformities. The most common ocular malformations were congenital corneal leukomas or acquired corneal opacities secondary to exposure and eyelid colobomas. The eyelid defects appeared to be extensions of facial clefts in these patients and were often located adjacent to the corneal opacities. Other anomalies included microphthalmos, strabismus, and hypertelorism. One patient had the typical peripheral and facial stigmata of the amniotic band syndrome in association with a coloboma of the left iris and retina.

An ecological analysis of demographic variation in rural New South Wales.

"Despite an outpouring of ecological work by geographers and others over the past fifteen years, interest in the ecologies of rural areas has been low and firm generalizations about, for example, variations in social and demographic characteristics within rural regions have been slow to emerge. The objective of this paper is to discern the extent to which variations in demographic structures and processes within rural areas are patterned according to the nature of the agricultural economy. Some significant associations between age-sex structure and measures of agricultural intensity and type of farming are discerned for the New South Wales case, but the patterning is complex and owes much to differentiating forces not examined here."