Women are significantly more likely than men to present with recurrent ocular toxoplasmosis, a study involving Flinders University has found.
Professor Justine Smith, from College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University, was a joint senior author of ‘Impact of gender on clinical features and outcomes of ocular toxoplasmosis’ published in British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The observational study involved 262 patients (139 women and 123 men) who presented to a tertiary referral uveitis service in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, with serological and clinical evidence of ocular toxoplasmosis.
Predefined data items including demographics, descriptors of uveitis and ocular toxoplasmosis, best-corrected visual acuity and ocular complications were disaggregated by gender and compared statistically.
According to Smith and her fellow researchers, which also included Flinders University medical student Matilda Lyons, approximately equal numbers of women and men had active versus inactive ocular toxoplasmosis. In both women and men, most infections were remotely acquired.
Men were significantly more likely to present with primary active disease than women (24.4% versus 12.9%). Conversely, women were significantly more likely to present with recurrent active disease than men (36.0% versus 28.5%).
According to the study’s results, one toxoplasmic retinal lesion was observed in more male eyes than female eyes (50.4% versus 35.3%), while women’s eyes were more likely to have multiple lesions than men’s eyes (54.7% versus 39.8%).
Lesions in women’s eyes were significantly more likely to occur at the posterior pole compared with those in men’s eyes (56.1% versus 39.8%). Measures of vision were similar for women and men.
“There were no significant differences in measures of visual acuity, ocular complications, and occurrence and timing of reactivations between the genders,” the authors noted.
The concluded that ocular toxoplasmosis has equivalent outcomes in women and men, with clinical differences in the form and type of disease, as well as characteristics of the retinal lesion.
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