Pay attention to the basic and translational researches on orbital diseases

Orbital diseases are common, comprehensive, complicated and a variety of eye diseases, mainly including inflammation, trauma, tumors and vascular lesions.Orbital diseases may lead to a large variety of compromises such as decrease of vision, destroy of ocular structures, disfigured of appearance and even threaten patient’s life.There is a quite high requirement for the comprehensive quality of orbital surgeon due to lot of disease kinds, unelucidated pathogenesis and complex therapy methods.In recent years, a broad spectrum of basic researches on orbital diseases are emphasized and carried out, especially in the studies on causal genes and regulatory molecules of thyroid associated ophthalmopathy (TAO) combined environmental factors and genetics background, mechanism of orbital bone defect repair and regeneration on orbital microenvironment and osteogenic promoting materials, identification of specific targets playing key roles in growth and metastasis of orbital tumors, investigation of epigenetics mechanism in orbital venous malformation on the basis of damage of elastic fiber of smooth muscle as a basic pathological feature, etc.China has made great progress in a few aspects of orbital diseases and gained international recognition.However, it is realized that the relevant basic research in China faces with great challenges because of later start and fewer researchers.Therefore, much more efforts need to be made in China to catch up with developed countries at overall level.We should consolidate basic researches of orbital diseases taking advantages of much more patients and increasing financial support from our governments.Then step by step translational researches and clinical trials with selected points can be performed to promote the levels of diagnosis and management of orbital diseases.