Herpetic anterior uveitis following Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine: two case reports.

PURPOSE: To describe two cases of herpetic anterior uveitis after inoculation of the first dose of Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine. METHODS: Case 1: a healthy 92-year-old Caucasian woman developed symptomatic unilateral anterior uveitis for 3 days after Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination (Pfizer Inc.). The episode fully resolved with topical and oral antiviral treatment. Case 2: a previously healthy 85-year-old Caucasian woman with left hemicranial signs of herpes zoster infection, associated with herpetic keratouveitis for 3 days after Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination. Treatment with topical antibiotics and both oral and topical antiherpetic medication was administered, and she recovered successfully in 5 weeks. CONCLUSION: Clinicians should be aware of the possibility of eye inflammation in the form of herpetic reactivation after coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination.

Visual Acuity and Number of Amniotic Membrane Layers as Indicators of Efficacy in Amniotic Membrane Transplantation for Corneal Ulcers: A Multicenter Study.

BACKGROUND: To evaluate new indicators in the efficacy of amniotic membrane transplantation (AMT) for non-healing corneal ulcers (NHCUs). METHODS: Retrospective, multicenter study. In total, 223 AMTs for NHCU in 191 patients were assessed. The main outcomes studied were the success rate of AMT (complete re-epithelization), postoperative visual acuity (VA) gain, and number of AM layers transplanted. RESULTS: The overall AMT success rate was 74.4%. In 92% of our patients VA stability or improvement. Postoperative VA was significantly higher than preoperative VA in the entire cohort (p < 0.001) and in all etiological groups of ulcers (post-bacterial, p ≤ 0.001; post-herpetic, p ≤ 0.0038; neurotrophic ulcers, p ≤ 0.014; non-rheumatic peripheral, p ≤ 0.001; and ulcers secondary to lagophthalmos and eyelid malposition or trauma, p ≤ 0.004). Most participants (56.5%) presented a preoperative VA equal to or less than counting fingers (≤0.01). Of these, 13.5% reached a postoperative VA equal to or better than legal blindness (≥0.05) after AMT. A higher success rate was observed in the monolayer than in the multilayer AMT (79.5% and 64.9%, respectively; p = 0.018). No statistically significant values were found between the number of layers transplanted and VA gain (p = 0.509). CONCLUSION: AMT is not only beneficial in achieving complete re-epithelialization in NHCUs but also in improving postoperative VA; these improvements are independent of etiologies of ulcers. Furthermore, the use of monolayer AMT seems to be a more appropriate option than multilayer AMT for NHCU since the multilayer AMT did not present better outcomes (success rate and VA gain) compared to monolayer AMT in the different types of ulcers studied.