Corneal donation-transplantation process: predictors of corneal tissue quality and graft failure
Corneal transplantation; Free Tissue Flaps; Corneal diseases; Graft Rejection; Epidemiology.
The identification of the variables inherent in the donation-transplantation process that may interfere with the survival of corneal tissue after transplantation in a given service requires adequate investigation, due to the increasing number of corneal transplants that are performed every year throughout the World and because it is a procedure that involves risks of failure. This study aims to identify predictors of corneal tissue quality and to relate them to cases of post-transplant graft failure according to the different degrees of corneal quality classification in a reference service in the state of Rio de Janeiro Great Northern. This is an epidemiological study with a two-step quantitative approach with two different designs. The first will be a retrospective, longitudinal, descriptive and analytical cohort study that will address the whole process of corneal uptake by the Human Ocular Tissue Bank (BTOH) in the state of Rio Grande do Norte (RN) until the transplant is completed. The second will consist of a hospital-based, longitudinal, descriptive, and analytical case-control study, which will include patients transplanted with corneal graft failure and their controls from a referral service of the NB. To compose the sample, the corneas captured by the BTOH of the RN (step 1) and the patients transplanted with corneal tissue in a reference service in the state of the RN (step 2) will be considered. The medical records of patients diagnosed with graft failure will constitute the case group, and the control group will be composed of the other medical records of patients who do not present graft failure. Data collection will begin in the second half of 2017. The collected data will be organized into spreadsheets with construction of a database that will be managed for descriptive and inferential analysis procedures. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), version 20.0, will be used for descriptive analysis of the data. The level of significance to be adopted will be 0.05.