Comparing the Quality of Topical Autologous Serum in Different Etiologies of Dry Eye Syndrome

Dry eye is an important issue in the filed of ophthalmology and has great influence on the quality of life in many patients. Traditional treatment was mainly focused on artificial tear supplement. Inflammatory factors are identified in the recent days and are thought to play an important role in the etiology of dry eye. Anti-inflammatory agent like topical immunosuppressant has become another choice in the treatment of dry eye.

Conventional artificial tear has similar biochemical features and osmolarity with natural tear but lacks the anti-inflammatory cytokines. Therefore, autologous serum has been applied as a substitute of natural tear because it has more anti-inflammatory cytokines. Clinical trials have shown that autologous serum drops improve ocular irritation symptoms, and conjunctival and corneal dye staining in dry eye.

However, in the manufacture of autologous serum, it is hard to standardize every step and control quality. What's more, the patient may have different etiology of dry eye, including primary Sjogren's syndrome, secondary Sjogren's syndrome, other autoimmune disease, or ocular graft versus host disease. The etiology of dry eye may have different response to autologous serum. However, we don't know if the autologous serum from different patients' have different components and the different components of cytokines may have different treatment efficacy. This is what we want to know in this study.

Since human autologous serum is needed for cytokine analysis, we proposed this project to collect human serum from volunteers。