• Namrata Sharma, Tarun Arora, Deepali Singhal, Prafulla K Maharana, Prashant Garg, Ritu Nagpal, Somasheila Murthy, Srinivas Gunnam, Aditya Arora, Venkatesh Prajna, Revathi Rajaraman, Prema Padmanabhan, Arvind Kumar, Rajiv Kumar, Swati Tomar, Anila Thomas, Rekha Gyanchand, Ritu Arora, Bani Biswas, and Samar Basak.
• Department of Ophthalmology, National Eye Bank, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India.
• Indian J Ophthalmol. 2019 Jul 1; 67 (7): 1056-1059.

PurposeTo study the trends in collection, storage and utilization of donor corneas in eye banks in India.MethodsThe data was collected from 12 eye banks in India that collected more than 1000 corneas per year. The retrospective analysis of the parameters like characteristics of the donor and the host, storage media used, number of eyes collected, number of eyes utilized, causes of non-utilization of the tissue and the procedures performed was done.ResultsA total of 20,564 eyes were collected by the 12 eye banks during the year 2013-2014. Voluntary eye donation (VED), and hospital cornea retrieval program (HCRP) contributed to 59.6% and 40.4% of tissue procurement respectively. Whole globe enucleation (52.3%) was more commonly performed as compared to in-situ excision of the donor corneas. The most commonly used storage media at all eye banks was McCarey-Kaufman (MK) media (83.3%). The utilization rate of the donor eyes was 50.5%. The most frequent indication for corneal transplantation was infection (active infection - 33.13%, healed infection - 10.78%) followed by Pseudophakic bullous keratopathy (PBK) (13.57%). Full thickness keratoplasty (optical penetrating keratoplasty - 47.23%, therapeutic penetrating keratoplasty - 31.74%) was performed most often followed by endothelial keratoplasty (12.41%) in the developing country.ConclusionVED still contributes to majority of the donor tissue retrieval in India. The majority of the eye banks still utilize whole globe enucleation technique and store tissues in MK media. Trends from previous years showed a change towards HCRP, in-situ excision technique and preservation in the long-term storage media.

18 keywords...

hide…