Italy, Corneal Transplantation in Wrong Eye

At Padua General Hospital (Italy) a man of 37 has been the victim of an incredible mistake. In hospital for an operation on the cornea of the right eye affected by a condition called keratoconus, the patient found that the affected eye was unchanged and that the new cornea, sent from the eye bank at Mestre, had been transplanted in the healthy eye. The patient is now in a state of shock: relatives have reported the hospital to the authorities and the new director general of Asl, Adriano Cestrone, has been in contact with the public prosecutor's office.

How could something like this have happened? The surgical notes indicated that the healthy eye also showed lines of hemosiderin, an iron-protein organic compound which is one of the forms of iron deposit in tissue and typical of keratoconus. The disorder is almost always bilateral. It develops progressively at a certain time of life and, from a clinical point of view, affects both eyes at different times and in different ways, giving the impression that the keratoconus is in one eye only.

Keratoconus is a condition in which the cornea becomes deformed, changing from domed-shaped to cone-shaped, and thus affects clarity of vision. The reason for the deformation is not yet completely understood, but it is linked with a series of factors, including hereditary mal-functioning of the metabolism. One of the main causes is the alteration of the collagen structure of the corneal stroma.