ABSTRACT
The eye can be affected by almost any of the immunological disorders associated with autoimmunity. Understanding the primary mechanism of a particular patient’s inflammatory problem lays the groundwork for the correct treatment. The diagnostic pursuit of mechanistic understanding of the patient’s inflammatory problem will be sight saving, at the very least, and may be responsible for the diagnosis of a disease that, undiagnosed, would have been fatal. This chapter is organized along the lines of the classic Gell, Coombs, and Lachmann hypersensitivity
reactions (71). The four types of hypersensitivity reactions rarely exist in pure form in human pathological states, in isolation from each other; it is typical for hypersensitivity reactions to include more than one of the Gell and Coombs responses as participants in the inflammatory problem. When it is known, this combination of types of mechanisms is pointed out in the various ocular diseases presented and discussed in this chapter. The ophthalmic complications of the connective tissue, collagen vascular, and vasculitic diseases that comprise many of the type III hypersensitivity reactions typical of autoimmunity are covered in Chapter 6.
