Jane Olver to Chair BOPSS 2017 Lacrimal Session

At the forthcoming BOPSS 2017 meeting 21st to 23rd June I will be chairing a session on 22nd June on lacrimal surgery. First of all, we have Professor Yoon-Duck Kim from Korea talking about the management of canalicular obstruction and I will be talking about the management of nasolacrimal duct obstruction in a lecture called the ‘Harmony of DCR’.
This lecture is about the value of external DCR, endo DCR or combined external endo DCR. There will then be Dr Ashok Grover from New Delhi talking about tear duct obstruction in children. This is most commonly congenital nasolacrimal duct obstruction which I also look after a lot here in London and lastly we have Dr Reynaldo Javate a very well known speaker from the Philippines who is going to be talking about advances in tear duct surgery particularly with trans-canalicular endoscopic lacrimal duct re-canalisation. That sounds like a very long term and we therefore usually just call it TLDR.
These lectures are not open to the public, but I will be letting you know afterwards how the meeting goes, in particular, my session that I am chairing on lacrimal surgery. It is an invaluable meeting held one a year for oculoplastic surgeons who are members of the British Oculoplastic Surgery Society to update and learn more about eyelid, tear duct and orbital surgeries.
Watering eyes is a perennial problem. People get watering eyes with hay fever in spring time. They get watering eyes because of dryness in the summer time, and they get watering eyes because of narrowed or blocked nasolacrimal ducts in the winter time.
There are many different ways of approaching watering eyes, and the first thing we have to do is to assess the patient with a watering eye and then decide whether it is caused by a medical problem such as allergy or dry eye, or an anatomical problem, such as gradual narrowing of the nasolacrimal duct.
Other parts of the lacrimal drainage system can also be affected and become narrowed and stenosed if there has been conjunctivitis such as viral conjunctivitis. Herpes simplex conjunctivitis can often close up the canaliculi and puncta causing quite a severe watering eye.