IKA Keratoconus Symposium 2023: Strategies for early diagnosis

Video transcript

Justin Schweitzer, OD, FAAO:
Hi, my name is Justin Schweitzer. I'm an optometrist at Vance Thompson Vision in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and I'm really excited to be here at the IKA Keratoconus Symposium. I'm doing a lecture with Dr. Kourtney Houser on early diagnosis of keratoconus.

It can be one of the most challenging things that we face as eye care providers, which is trying to identify keratoconus early in the disease process. It's important to identify it early in the disease process because we have ways to obviously slow it down, to stop it with corneal cross-linking now available. The problem is if we don't catch it early, and it progresses, that's where our patients really start to struggle from a quality of life standpoint, and into the future for themselves.

Some of the things that we touched on and how to identify it early—still the standard of care being tomography—but looking at changes in astigmatism over time, looking at changes in refractive error, looking at topographical changes as well. We talked about utilizing genetics to help assess the risk of our patients to maybe watch them closer, to avoid doing refractive surgery on those patients. We talked a little bit about corneal biomechanics as well and the role that that can play in diagnosing our patients earlier in the disease process.

It was a lot of fun going through this lecture with Kourtney, and we hope that we were able to provide some clinical relevant pearls that you can take to your clinics on Monday morning. It was an honor to be here at the IKA 1st Annual Keratoconus Symposium. I hope to see you all soon.