AOA 2023: Pharmaceutical treatment of anterior segment inflammatory conditions

Mile Brujic, OD, FAAO, gives key takeaways of his presentation, "Pharmaceutical treatment of anterior segment inflammatory conditions," which he presented during the 2023 AOA Optometry's Meeting in Washington, DC.

Video Transcript

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mile Brujic, OD, FAAO:

Hi, I'm Dr. Mile Brujic, I'm a partner of a four location practice in Northwest Ohioand I'm just honored to be presenting at the American Optometric Association's national meeting. I've been fortunate enough to lecture on topics that I'm pretty passionate about, and one of those is anterior segment inflammatory disease.

I think over the 21 years that I've been in clinical practice, I've seen massive advancements in therapeutics that give us the ability to care for patients better, and this is what this course really highlights. Some of them are more traditional therapies, corticosteroids, but there are so many other ways that we can control inflammation.

And what's interesting is, we certainly are going to be talking about pharmaceuticals and other therapeutics, but we also dive into other areas and procedures that have now been shown to reduce levels of inflammation on the eyes.

I think the key takeaway to all of this is a lesson that I learned very, very early in my career, and that we sometimes will see complications because of inflammation on the surface of the eye. But the reality is, is I see more complications of less utilization of anti-inflammatories than more utilization. So becoming comfortable with a lot of those therapeutic agents, I think is a massive and professional obligation for us and our patients.

And I think the biggest thing for us is, we start looking at the eye on the ocular surface, and the anterior segment globally, very, very differently when we start thinking about inflammation equals something that we need to address.

And again, there's now several ways depending on where that inflammation stems from, and we go and dive into details on all of these clinical conditions, and also a lot of the therapeutics that are available—not only the things that are currently available, but also the things that are promised to be down the pipe and available in the next 1, 3, 5, and 10 months from now.