Sonography of the injured eyes of children - a suburban tertiary care experience

Abstract

When children eyes are exposed to trauma, imaging modalities including ultrasonography can be used to establish diagnosis, type, and extent of injury. To evaluate the usefulness of ultrasonography in the management of children with eye injuries as well as find out the pattern of lesions found in the pediatric age group. This was a retrospective study of all the children aged 17years and below that attended the emergency or eye clinic and or referred from private health facility around a tertiary Health facility south West Nigeria and were referred to Radiology Department for ultrasound assessment over a two year period.There was a lot of overlap of sonographic findings in the examined eyes. Cataract (38.5%) and Vitreous Hemorrhage (25.6%) were the most frequent findings, followed by choroidal (17.9%) and retinal detachments (17.9%), lens rupture (5.1%) and subluxation (5.1%) respectively. The pattern of findings in children is different from the adult pattern. The findings were found to influence the management in the various cases and post traumatic cataract was the most frequent complication found. Increased awareness is to be mounted in health talks to parents/guardians as well as school teachers on the safe mode of discipline of a child to avoid eye injuries following canning.