ARVO 2025: Inflammatory eye disorders in hidradenitis suppurativa patients

At ARVO 2025, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Anisha Kasi talked about her presentation on how her team used the TriNetX database, a large database of over 150 million patients worldwide, to validate the connection between hidradenitis suppurativa and inflammatory eye conditions.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Anisha Kasi:

Hi. My name is Anisha Kasi. I'm a second-year medical student at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York. My project was on hidradenitis suppurativa, which is a systemic inflammatory condition, and its correlation with inflammatory and infectious eye diseases. We use the TriNetX database, which is a large database of over 150 million patients worldwide. We used it to validate the connection between hidradenitis suppurativa and inflammatory eye conditions. We found that HS was associated with a higher risk of keratitis, marginal corneal ulcers, and scleritis. This is important because HS patients are typically under followed when it comes to specialty care, and so our findings underscore the importance of regular ophthalmic care in patients with HS. Given the high worldwide prevalence of HS of 0.4 percent, this is very important. We also found a decreased prevalence of conjunctivitis, blepharitis, and dry eye syndrome in patients with HS, which may be because antibiotic use in patients with HS may be decreasing risk for conjunctivitis all the while.

Overall, our study was important in being the largest database study to be conducted with HS patients. Our study was age, sex, and race controled. We had matched cohorts, and so overall, we found that it's very important to have regular follow-up in patients with HS. So something that was very important was our exclusion criteria. So patients with HS have been found to also be associated with conditions like psoriasis, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis, et cetera, IBD, chronic systemic inflammatory conditions. All the while, inflammatory and infectious eye conditions, or mostly inflammatory eye conditions, have also been found to be associated with diseases like psoriasis, IBD, et cetera, and so something that was very important in evaluating the connection between HS and inflammatory eye condition conditions was excluding these common conditions that are associated with both to really get an understanding of why HS might be connected to inflammatory eye diseases, what cytokines that are shared in their pathogenesis, et cetera.

So not only did we exclude for a lot of those conditions, but we also thought it was important to match for age, sex, and race, as I mentioned, because we found that when we were creating an HS cohort and a non-HS cohort. Patients with HS were more likely to be younger, female, and be African American or Hispanic or Latino, which made it very important to match for these conditions. HS is one of those conditions that isn't talked about much in the ophthalmic community, and likewise, patients who are being followed up with further HS with their primary care provider, they're not always checking in on ophthalmic conditions. So I think, honestly, this project highlights the necessity for overlap and connection between general medical providers and ophthalmologists alike to really care for this vulnerable patient population.