This Issue of Acta (2002)

This issue of the journal has a broad and highly varied content. In addition to original articles and case reports we have the Acta Honorary Lecture and the first article in our new image-oriented section Diagnosis/Therapy in Ophthalmology. There is also a new contribution in our Clinical Questions with Answers series. The editorial deals with the subject of two of the original articles in the issue. This more varied content is an indication of the intended direction of the journal, and I hope that Acta can continue to develop in this way; in the future we may have further new sections with more debate and news items. One such news item in this issue contains a report on the Acta Award and the KKK Lundsgaard medals that were awarded at the recent XXXV Nordic Ophthalmological Congress in Tampere, Finland. The Acta Ophthalmologica Honorary Lecture was delivered by Professor Niels Ehlers, the recipient of the Acta Ophthalmologica Award and Gold Medal in Tampere. The corresponding article describes the background and development of the Danish Eye Bank System, an inventive system, which has formed a model for corneal banking internationally. There is a very interesting review on macular holes in the current issue. The paper contains interesting and clinically useful data on prevalence, natural history and treatment effects. Two papers by Lundvall and Kugelberg, plus the editorial, deal with treatment effects after unilateral and bilateral congenital cataract. While modern treatment results are good in patients with bilateral cataract, the long-term results in unilateral cases still leave a lot to be desired. Two papers investigate visual acuities in a more or less population-based setting. Bergman and Sjöstrand report results from a longitudinal study involving subjects followed from 70 to 97 years of age. The results are sobering; it is obvious that 1.0 is not the normal visual acuity in all ages. From the same city comes a report dealing the visual acuities among the very young. Hård and coworkers have analysed the consequences of changing criteria for referrals when screening for reduced visual acuity in preschool children. There are many papers on glaucoma in the current issue. A highly interesting study by Detorakis and coworkers suggests that Herpes Simplex virus may be associated with pseudoexfoliation. Nowadays, infections are of course thought to cause or contribute to many diseases that were previously thought to have entirely different causes, e.g., Heliobacter Pylori and peptic ulcers. Hietanen and coworkers found a similar frequency of exfoliation syndrome in patients with abdominal aortic aneurysms and controls, thus challenging the proposed connection between exfoliation syndrome and abdominal aortic aneurysms. Another negative report deals with objective VEP perimetry, which has been reported to be accurate for visual field testing in glaucoma. These reports are challenged by a paper by Bengtsson, where the electrophysiological technique yielded results with unacceptable specificity and sensitivity. Grødum et al. compare glaucoma patients identified through a very large mass screening and in routine clinical practice. The clinically undetected glaucoma patients, who were found in the screening had significantly lower IOPs and less glaucoma damage than those that had been diagnosed in clinical practice. The results have important implications for glaucoma screening. Two glaucoma papers are drug studies; Ermis et al. contribute with new results showing that dorzolamide causes further reduction of IOP in eyes inadequately controlled on brimonidine. Honrubia and coworkers compared the fixed timolol-dorzolamide combination with latanoprost in a large number of patients not controlled by timolol alone. The average IOP reductions did not differ between the drugs. A basic science glaucoma paper by Krohn and coworkers show histochemical differences between human aqueous drainage channels, lymphatic vessels and blood vessels. Two papers relate to ocular blood flow. Bjärnhall and coworkers describe an improved method for measuring mean retinal transit time in fluorescein angiograms. Vécsei et al. show that antibodies against Chlamydia pneumoniae, a common respiratory human pathogen increasingly believed to have a causative role in atherosclerosis, did not differ between patients with acute central retinal artery occlusions and age- and sex-matched controls. The Clinical Questions with Answers section deals with the management of a case of orbital rhabdomyosarcoma of the orbit, and discuss the differences between this rare disease and the much rarer and less favourable alveolar subtype. The first contribution in the series Diagnosis/Therapy in Ophthalmology shows the resolution of pseudomonas aeruginosa keratitis after debridement.