Ocular syphilis: Case Series (2000–2015) from Two Tertiary Care Centers in Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background In the past 15 years, a recrudescence of syphilis was observed in Canada, along with a surge in ocular syphilis cases. Without treatment, ocular syphilis can have serious consequences potentially leading to blindness. Our goal was to describe the demographics, clinical presentations, proportion of co-infection with HIV, treatments and visual outcomes of ocular syphilis cases. Methods Patients with a confirmed positive syphilis serology between 2000 and 2015 were identified through the reference laboratory database. A retrospective chart review was performed for those who visited the ophthalmology clinic of Hôpital Maisonneuve-Rosemont or Hôpital Notre-Dame to identify ocular syphilis cases. Results Among the 119 patients (174 eyes) identified (2.5% of the population screened), 80% were male; of which 63% were MSM. Mean presenting logMAR visual acuity was 0.70 (20/100 Snellen) and unilateral ocular involvement occurred in 54%. Ocular manifestations included interstitial keratitis (24 eyes), anterior uveitis (37 eyes), intermediate uveitis (17 eyes), posterior uveitis (31 eyes), panuveitis (27 eyes), isolated optic nerve involvement (25 eyes), and others (12 eyes) including VI nerve palsy, scleritis, and episcleritis. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) examination was done in 65 (55%) patients. Of those, VDRL was positive in 14 (22%) patients; white blood cells and proteins were elevated in, respectively, 28 (43%) and 39 (60%) of patients. HIV status was unknown in 39 (33%) patients; among those whose serology were performed (or previous status was known), 38 (48%) were HIV infected. Intravenous aqueous penicillin G was administered in 69 (58%), intramuscular benzathine penicillin in 25 (21%) and other antibiotics, mainly due to allergy, in three (3%) patients. Treatment allowed a visual improvement of –0.22 logMAR (gain of five lines on Snellen chart) after a mean follow-up period of 19 months. Conclusion Syphilis can manifest with a widely diversified array of ocular presentations, especially uveitis and optic nerve involvement. Therefore it is primordial to keep this diagnosis in mind when facing high-risk patients with ocular symptoms. It is of utmost importance that clinicians improve rates of lumbar puncture, HIV screening and intraveinous penicillin treatment when managing ocular syphilis. Disclosures All authors: No reported disclosures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".