Pay attention to uveitis and be alert to underlying rheumatic diseases!

  Uveitis is a common blinding eye disease in ophthalmology. There are at least 3 million patients with uveitis in China, mostly in young adults. The main manifestations of uveitis are red eyes, eye pain, photophobia and tearing, blurred vision and decreased visual acuity.  It should be noted that many patients with uveitis are still recurrent after these treatments, eventually leading to severe vision loss and even blindness.  Why? In fact, uveitis should be a broad immune disease, and many uveitis are also localized to the eye in systemic rheumatic diseases such as leukoarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis (spondyloarthropathy), reactive arthritis, and others. Thus, local treatment of many rheumatic disease-related uveitis eyes is not sufficient and should be followed by aggressive treatment of systemic diseases and application of immunosuppressive agents (cyclosporine, azathioprine, cyclophosphamide, biologics, etc.).  If a patient develops uveitis, he or she should visit a rheumatologist to exclude systemic rheumatic diseases.  Of course, patients can also perform self-examination and pay attention to the following symptoms: 1) mucosal ulcers (oral or vulvar ulcers); 2) joint swelling and pain or low back pain; 3) rash (psoriatic rash, erythema nodosum, etc.).  If the above symptoms are present, rheumatism should be highly suspected.