Ocular manifestations of leukemia and ocular side effects of its treatments

Leukemia is a common malignancy of the hematologic system.Many patients may have ocular manifestations, and even some patients are initially diagnosed in the ophthalmology department because of visual impairments or ocular disorders.Leukemia affects almost all ocular tissues such as anterior segment, vitreous body, retina, optic nerve, choroid, and orbit through direct infiltration or indirect factors including anemia, thrombocytopenia, elevated blood viscosity, immuno-suppression etc.The characteristic ocular manifestations include Roths spots, chlorosarcoma and so on.The likelihood of ocular involvement and the site of invasion varies with the type of leukemia, with acute leukemia more likely than chronic leukemia and myeloid leukemia more likely than lymphoblastic leukemia.Due to the advances in treatment of leukemia, especially anti-leukemia targeted drugs and hematopoietic stem cells transplantation, patient survival has been significantly prolonged.At the same time, the treatments can also cause or aggravate ophthalmic conditions.For example, tyrosinase inhibitor drugs can cause periorbital edema, cytarabine has corneal toxicity, methotrexate causes paralysis of extraocular muscles, and keratoconjunctivitis sicca is very likely to occur after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation.These side effects greatly affect the patient’s quality of life, so ophthalmologists should pay more and more attention to leukemia-related eye diseases.The ocular manifestations of leukemia and ocular side effects of its treatments are reviewed in this article.

Leukemia; Ocular manifestations; Therapy; Ocular side effects; Graft versus host disease