In this post, Dr. Judy Ku discusses the treatments for viral keratitis and how your suitability depends on the type that you have; herpes simplex keratitis or shingles.
So what are the treatments for herpetic eye disease?
If you have herpes simplex, it’s quite different to having shingles, so it needs to be properly diagnosed to start with. We commonly start you with some antiviral treatment in the eye. If it’s quite severe, we might even put you on oral antiviral treatments as well. It’s important to remember that some of these treatments may take some weeks to fully work.
In certain cases, we may need to administer some steroids to minimise the amount of inflammation in the eye. If you do develop inflammation or scarring in the eye, you may actually be taking these steroid drops for up to a year, or sometimes two, before we can actually slowly taper them.
Shingles treatments
If you have shingles in the eye, similarly, we do need to also introduce steroids at some point, and it may take some time to taper off. Some patients actually end up taking these drops for life depending on what stage they have been diagnosed at.
We’d like to invite you to book a consultation with us.
It’s the only way that we can really assess the health of your eye and understand your condition and what we may need to do to get your eye health back to where it should be.
We look forward to meeting you so we can talk in person and discuss your condition in detail and get your eye health back on track.
