Ocular Surface: Anatomy and Physiology, Disorders and Therapeutic Care PDF

Preface

This book has been conceived to aid eye care practitioners in their dailyclinical practice. However, this book also includes brief and selective background information for appropriate patient management. Therefore, this book will not only be useful to general practitioners, ophthalmologists, and optometrists but also to other eye care or research professionals such as biologists, biochemists and medical doctors interested in the ocular surface.

For this reason, this text is structured in four main sections that involve 20 chapters. The fi rst section is dedicated towards the anatomy and physiology of the ocular surface; defi ning the concept, describing the tear fi lm structure and its effect on the optical function of the eye, the corneal and conjunctival anatomy. This section provides the background to the reader to understand ocular surface disorders and their clinical management described in later sections.

The second section of this book covers the most common ocular surface disorders, namely: dry eye, anterior and posterior blepharitis, keratitis, ocular allergy, cicatricial conjunctivitis, and the ocular surface alterations related with Glaucoma treatment.

Following the description of the common ocular surface disorders, the third section of this book delineates the therapeutic care of these disorders, including topical, systemic and surgical treatment options.

Finally, the fourth section addresses the relationship of the ocular surface and contact lens-wear, specifi cally to describe indications for contact lenses, complications that are related to contact lens-wear and managing the adverse effects of contact lens-wear.

The contributors to this book are internationally recognized investigators in various aspects of ocular surface physiology, pathology and infl ammation research. They were asked to use the ocular surface as the central theme when writing their chapters and to use simple language to explain their work in order to make this text appropriate for a wide variety of readers as well as update the state-of-the-art in the ocular surface.

We feel that the strength of this book lies in the wide variety of specialities of the contributors, thus providing this range to our readers. It is our hope that you will use this text as a guide to understanding the pathophysiology, diagnosis and treatment of ocular surface diseases.

Finally, we also wish to express our profound gratitude to our esteemed authors for fi nd the immense amount of time and effortdedicated to the evolution of this book, without them this book would not have been possible.