Background: Behcet's disease is a multisystemic inflammatory disease which may lead to blindness. The purpose of this study was to describe and compare the clinical features and visual outcome of Behcet's uveitis in Taiwan.
Methods: The medical charts of 227 consecutive patients (414 eyes) with Behcet's uveitis who were seen in the Uveitis Clinic of Taipei Veterans General Hospital were reviewed: 96 patients (group A) between 1984 and 1993 and 131 (group B) between 1994 and 2003.
Results: The male-to-female ratio was 1.6. The mean age at the time of uveitis onset was 30.8 years. Males were most affected in the 3rd and 4th decades and females in the 2nd to 5th decades. There were more skin and gastrointestinal lesions in males, and less skin and genital lesions in group B. HLA-B51 antigen was found in 35.7% of patients. Treatment with cyclosporin, azathioprine and methotrexate was more frequent in group B. Uveitis occurred bilaterally in 83.9% of patients. At the first visit, potential visual acuity (VA) was 0.1 or less in 24.7% of eyes in males and 11.4% in females. The mean time from presentation to loss of useful vision (> 0.1) was 51 months in 19.1% of eyes. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis estimated the risks of losing useful vision at 5, 10 and 15 years as being 22.6%, 43.0% and 58.5%, respectively. VA at the first and last visits were better and VA deterioration slower in group B.
Conclusion: Visual outcome is poorer in males than in females and has improved in the recent decade, but still a significant proportion of patients lose their vision quickly. The number of new patients has not decreased.