Care. Education. Research. A Center of Excellence for Uveitis BY ALBERT T. VITALE, MD
The overarching mission of the Moran Eye Center’s Uveitis Division consists of three parts: to provide state-of-the-art, comprehensive, timely, and compassionate care to patients suffering from uveitis; to serve as leaders in the clinical education of uveitis locally, nationally, and internationally; and to contribute to the field through collaborative and investigator-initiated clinical research.
PATIENT CARE The physicians in our division, Akbar Shakoor, MD, Marissa B. Larochelle, MD, and I, together with our uveitis fellow, provide a prodigious amount of direct patient care, both medical and surgical. Our team treats individuals of all ages suffering from various complex ocular inflammatory and infectious or masquerading neoplastic diseases and their complications. The only program of its kind in the Mountain West, our division is nationally recognized as a regional referral center of excellence, working in collaboration with University of Utah Health rheumatology (adult and pediatric), infectious diseases, and Huntsman Cancer Institute specialists. We endeavor to provide personalized and complete care. Our collective training and experience in uveitis and vitreoretinal diseases and comprehensive ophthalmology and complex cataract surgery is unique. We can provide the most advanced diagnostic modalities and therapeutic approaches, individualized to patients, their specific ocular or systemic disease, or both, and address the potential side effects of treatment. Specifically, these include: Diagnostic intraocular tissue sampling with molecular analysis.
From left, Marissa B. Larochelle, MD, Albert T. Vitale, MD, and Akbar Shakoor, MD. —2—
The use of established systemic conventional and newly available biologic steroid-sparing medications.
Appropriate use of primary and adjunctive corticosteroid injections, including sustained-release intravitreal inserts and implants. Visual rehabilitation of the structural ocular complications of uveitis in the anterior and posterior segment employing advanced cataract and vitreoretinal surgical techniques.
