Groundbreaking tooth-in-eye surgery helps man regain vision after 20 years
When Brent Chapman was 13, he took ibuprofen during a Christmas basketball game. It was a drug he had taken before, but what happened next was anything but routine: He had a severe reaction that caused burns all over his body, including on the surface of his eyes.
Chapman was in a coma for 27 days. He lost his left eye to an infection and lost most of his vision in the other. His body recovered, but his vision never fully returned.
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“For the last 20 years, I’ve been having close to 50 surgeries trying to save this eye, most of them cornea transplants,” Chapman said of his right eye. “We would put a new cornea in. It would last sometimes just a few months or even up to years, but it would just kind of never heal.”
But Dr. Greg Moloney, clinical associate professor of corneal surgery at the University of British Columbia, was able to restore Chapman’s sight this year with a rare procedure that involved implanting Chapman’s own tooth into his eye.
“I’m very happy and am just taking in the world again, appreciating the little things. It’s been kind of surreal and kind of a euphoric feeling to it,” Chapman said.
The procedure, also known as tooth-in-eye or osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, involves removing a patient’s tooth, sewing a piece of it into the cheek and placing the structure into their eye.
It’s considered a last resort
“It’s a situation where a standard corneal transplant simply won’t work,” said Dr. Vicente Diaz, assistant professor of ophthalmology and visual science at the Yale School of Medicine. Diaz was not involved with Chapman’s case but treats people who have Stevens-Johnson syndrome, the rare and sometimes fatal drug reaction that caused Chapman’s blindness.
The condition causes severe inflammation of the skin and mucous membranes, including the eyes. In some cases, Diaz said, the immune system attacks and destroys the limbal stem cells that are essential for keeping the cornea clear. Without these cells, corneal tissue becomes scarred and keratinised, as if the cornea has skin growing over it, blocking light from reaching the retina.
Stevens-Johnson syndrome can be triggered by any medication or infection, although certain drugs such as seizure medications, gout medications and antibacterial sulfa drugs carry a higher risk.
