Eye care in the community Part 12 – Uveal melanoma

It is generally heartening to know that your young protégé is diligent in capturing abnormalities at a very early stage. In this article, I describe a patient who had been seen regularly by me for over 15 years but who, on his latest visit, saw our young optometrist who, on performing a slit-lamp examination, noticed a bulge in the iris and thought to inform me of the findings. The oncologist’s subsequent first line statement read, ‘His optician, Mr Patel, should be congratulated for finding this lesion which was asymptomatic and had never been noticed before.’ This is one of three cases of suspected uveal melanomas described in this article, while in the second article I will offer an insight into the monitoring of choroidal melanomas.

Case 1