What is Graves Eye Disease?

Thyroid eye disease or Graves' eye disease is a systemic autoimmune disease where cells feom tour bone marrow attack both the thyroid and can attack the eyes or tissue on the body. 

Basically it's an autoimmune condition where the body amounts an immune response, an immune reaction to both the thyroid and to the tissues in the eye socket. And this can cause swelling and expansion of the muscles and the fat inside the eye socket. It can push the eyebsll forward and making make the eyelids retract. It can make it so thst the muscles don't move properly and can cause double vision and, in the worst cases, it can cause so much pressure in the eye socket that it compromises the blood supply to the optic nerves and it can cause blindness. 

Most of the time the condition can be treated in its acute phase. It can be treated medically. Sometimes though, such as in the case where the optic nerve is being compressed, it does require a surgical intervention and that usually involves what's called an orbital decompression where one or more of the walls of the eye socket and sometimes the fat inside the eye socket are removed in order to create more room inside the eye socket for those expanded orbital tissues that decreases the pressure in the eye socket, restores the normal blood flow to the optic nerve and can restore vision to the patient. 

When it comes to the orbital decompression, ultrasonic bone aspiration is a technology that's been around for atleast fifteen years or so but I've had the opportunity to use it frequently in the setting of orbital decompression for thyroid related orbitopathy. And the traditional way to remove bone from the eye socket is to use a high speed drill but the ultrasonic bone aspirator does it in a much more gentle fashion and in a way that poses less risk to the orbital soft tissues and also to tissues behind the eye socket which can include the lining of the brain.