Eye care in the community: Sports related eye injuries

Eye care professionals encounter sports-related eye injuries frequently. Squash, shuttle cock and tennis ball injuries are fairly common injuries regularly seen in my practice. Others that spring to mind include the Liverpool footballer who had to visit Moorfields Eye Hospital following a scratch to his cornea and, worse still, a contact lens infection resulting from dirt flying into the eye of a Watford footballer during a match. This latter case eventually required a full corneal graft. In this article, I will describe three sporting injuries in some detail.

Case 1

A 39-year-old male goalkeeper suffered injury during a match when the ball ricocheted off a defender straight onto his left side of the face. On returning home, he complained to his wife that his left eye hurt on lateral movement. He also reported a slight blurring of vision inferiorly, but no defined loss of vision. He had undergone bilateral LASIK surgery some 10 years earlier which had corrected his -6.50DS myopia.