Eye injuries in a terrorist bombing - Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, June 25, 1996

Objective: We report the experience of our institution in the evaluation an d care of multiple simultaneous ocular trauma patients after a terrorist bo mb attack on a United States military base in Saudi Arabia. Design: Retrospective, noncomparative small case series. Participants: Three patients who received severe ocular injuries after a te rrorist bombing. Intervention: All patients underwent surgical repair of the injuries that w ere inflicted as a result of the terrorist bombing. Main Outcome Measures: Baseline ocular characteristics, intraoperative find ings, surgical procedures, and final (3 years after injury) anatomic and vi sual outcomes were noted. Results: Glass fragments caused by the blast were the mechanism of all the ocular injuries in these patients. All patients had primary repair of the i njuries done in Saudi Arabia and were sent to our institution for tertiary care. Three of the four eyes injured had stable or improved visual acuity a nd one eye was enucleated. Two patients had no serious injury other than th e globe trauma. One patient had extensive eyelid trauma and required serial procedures to allow fitting of a prosthesis. Conclusions: Blast-injury patients are at risk for open globe injury as a r esult of glass fragments. The types of injury that can occur from terrorist blasts can be extensive and involve all the tissues of the eye, the ocular adnexa, and the orbit. (C) 2000 by the American Academy of Ophthalmology.