4 OCULAR SIDE EFFECTS OF SYSTEMIC MEDICATIONS
Ocular Side Effects of Systemic Medications
Bruce E. Onofrey and Tonya G. Ketcham
Systemic medications have the potential, under certain circumstances, to produce undesirable adverse effects in all tissues of the body, including the eyes. Drug toxicity, which is heavily researched in clinical trials before the drugs are released, is not an infrequent occurrence.
However, ocular adverse reactions are often overlooked, misdiagnosed, or go unrecognized in clinical trials, and hence are severely underreported. Ocular side effects are often discovered after the drug has been released to the public. Currently, in the literature, over 75 specific drugs and, in some cases, classes of drugs have been linked with ocular side effects. The following tables will illustrate some of the more notable drug–eye interactions (Tables 4-1 to 4-12).