Intraocular foreign bodies in young people.

The authors examined 104 patients with penetrating ocular injuries and retained intraocular foreign bodies. Nineteen patients (18%), with 20 injured eyes, were aged 18 years or younger. Fifty percent of eyes in the young people (10/20) achieved a final visual acuity of 20/30 or better and 65% (13/20) achieved 20/100 or better. Young people were significantly more likely than adults to be injured as a result of a projectile weapon or explosion (P less than 0.001). They also had a greater incidence of an initial visual acuity worse than 5/200 (P less than 0.001), which was statistically associated with a greater incidence of hyphema (P = 0.002), retinal detachment (P = 0.022), and uveal prolapse (P = 0.082). Although the distribution of final visual acuity was not significantly different between young people and adults, the latter tended to have poorer visual outcome after adjusting for initial visual acuity (P = 0.01).