Recent Advances in the Diagnosis and Management of Herpetic Keratitis

Abstract

The chapter is focused on one of the major cause of keratitis - Herpetic keratitis, its epidemiology, natural course, clinical forms, prognosis, diagnosis and treatment. The estimated global incidence of HSV keratitis is roughly 1,5 million, including 40,000 new cases of each year. Patients are usually affected in the early decades of live, therefore the disease has a severe impact on quality of life and quality of vision in young, productive adults. The author describes the detailed corneal characteristics, provides slit lamp photographs, optical coherence tomography scans and confocal microscopy results of different forms of the HSV keratitis: epithelial, stromal, necrotizing and endothelial. The chapter also discusses recent methods of diagnosis based on PCR testing as well as established and future methods of treatment based on the latest research results.