Purpose: To analyze the corneal topography after grade I ocular perforating injuries. Methods: Twenty-one patients, attended and operated at the Department of Ophthalmology of Santa Casa de Sao Paulo during the year 1998, were included into this controlled clinical transversal study. Computerized corneal topography was performed using the EyeTech CT-2000 Corneal Topographer. Fellow eyes formed the control group. Results: Fifteen patients (71%) had wounds less than 4 mm. The mean corneal topographic astigmatism was 2.66 ± 2.64 D in the group of perforated eyes, and 0.52 ± 0.25 D in the control group. Statistically significant differences were found comparing the distribution of the patients with topographic corneal astigmatism higher or lower than 2.00 D in the categories of medium corneal wound size (p=0.04) and wound conformation (p=0.02). Localization showed no statistical difference (p=1.00). No statistically significant difference (p=0.98) was found comparing the mean corneal power in the group of perforated eyes with the control group. The final distribution of the topographic corneal pattern showed similarity between the group of perforated eyes and the control group, as well as that of the literature data. Best-corrected visual acuity better or equal to 0.5 was found in 81% of the patients. Conclusions: The topographic astigmatism resulting from corneal laceration was larger than that in the control group, although there was no qualitative change concerning topographic pattern in these eyes, having excluded the cases with irregular topography. Correlation between the final astigmatism and the wound size was found, confirming the critical size of 4 mm. Grade I ocular perforating injuries show good visual outcome, which is not the case with irregular topography or wounds larger than 4 mm.
Corneal topography; Eye injuries; Cornea
