RETINITIS.
With choroiditis and cyclitis, albuminuria, nephritis, mellituria, leukæmia, petechial fever, contagious pneumonia. Photophobia, contracted pupil, redness around optic disc, enlarged retinal vessels, white and gray spots and radiating lines, exudates, clots, fatty degeneration. Treatment: correct primary disease.
Retinitis is usually an accompaniment of choroiditis and cyclitis, but it also occurs as a complication in a number of constitutional maladies, such as albuminuria, nephritis, mellituria, leukæmia, petechial fever, contagious pneumonia, etc. Fröhner records a case in a leukæmic horse, Peters in one suffering from petechial fever, Schindelka in cases of contagious pneumonia in the horse, and Eversbusch in recurrent ophthalmia of the horse, and under other conditions in dogs.
The attack is accompanied at the outset with much photophobia and contraction of the pupil. When this is dilated and the fundus of the eye examined with the ophthalmoscope, the retina is seen to be reddened for some distance around the optic disc and the blood-vessels are materially enlarged. Later, white or gray spots and lines are seen in and around the disc, tending to assume a radiating direction, and the retina at large, on careful examination may have a distinctly striped appearance. Brownish, reddish or light colored exudates and hæmorrhages may be made out in certain cases between retina and hyaloid, or between the retina and choroid. Fatty degeneration of the fibrous tissue is common.
Treatment must be first that for the primary disease of which the retinitis is a complication, and the result will depend on how amenable that affection is to therapeutic measures. In advanced albuminuria or mellituria, the retinitis, which is usually double, is hopeless, while in contagious pneumonia, petechial fever, leukæmia and other less fatal affections, retinitis in its initial stages may recover. In cases of advanced disease with serious structural changes in the retina, recovery cannot be looked for.