Corneal ulcers in general practice

During an interview with dvm360 ahead of his lectures at the Veterinary Meeting & Expo (VMC) conference in Orlando, Florida, Alex Sigmund, DVM, DACVO, shared tips and tricks general practitioners can use with their patients to diagnose and manage corneal ulcers. Sigmund breaks down early signs of corneal ulcers veterinary professionals can be on the lookout for, the need for reevaluation, and the best Elizabethan collars to use for these patients.

Below is a partial transcript:

Alex Sigmund, DVM, DACVO: The biggest things you can look out for, thankfully, the kind of the most obvious ones that would indicate you looking for an ulcer. So that'd be something like squinting, tearing, and redness to the eye. You can also start to see some redness to the cornea itself, but any of those things are going to tell you that you need you at least a fluorescein stain to look for that corneal ulcer.

I'm a big proponent of just kind of lumping all the ophthalmology diagnostics together as an [ophthalmology] exam, so that you can just do a Schirmer stain and IOP [Intraocular pressure] on any of these red-eyed dogs, just because there's a lot of things that can contribute to each other that you can rule in or out pretty easily with that baseline level [ophthalmology] exam.