Cataracts in Patients with Rheumatic Diseases Treated with Corticosteroids

Abstract

A previous communication by the authors related the development of posterior subcapsular cataracts (PSC) to long-term high dose corticosteroid therapy,¹ and a subsequent paper² discussed the appearance and differential diagnosis of these cataracts. This report includes additional patients with the same complication and follow-up data on patients previously and presently reported. Methods and Material Collection of data and examination were carried out as outlined in previous papers. The diagnosis was established in all cases by biomicroscopy; patients with other ocular pathology which might be related to PSC were omitted from the series. This series consists of 95 patients. Twentythree of these had rheumatoid arthritis not treated with corticosteroids and thus served as controls; none of the controls developed PSC. Seventy-two patients, 28 of whom have not been reported previously, were treated with corticosteroids; of these 72 patients, 30 developed PSC (Table 2). Medical diagnoses of the corticosteroid treated