CIME 2024: Collaborative strategies for the management of thyroid eye disease

This weekend, the 18th Annual Controversies in Modern Eye Care conference took place in Los Angeles, California. One highlight was the panel on Thyroid Eye Disease, or TED, which featured Selina McGee, OD, FAAO; Amy Patel Jain, MD; Kelsey A. Roelefs, MD; Daniel B. Rootman, MD, MS. Here, McGee shares her thoughts on the panel as well as a look at the new Ocular Aesthetics Day at Northeastern State University Oklahoma College of Optometry (NSUOCO).

Video transcript

Editor's note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Selina McGee, OD, FAAO:

Hi, I am Dr. Selina McGee. I'm an optometrist in Edmond, Oklahoma, at BeSpoke Vision. And I'm here sharing information about Thyroid Eye Disease that we're going to talk about this afternoon. And I really wanted to just share as an optometrist where our role is in Thyroid Eye Disease, because these patients tend to get passed around for sometimes multiple visits and sometimes months to years before they actually get a proper diagnosis, which can be very challenging for these patients. And so, looking for things like ocular surface disease, dry eye disease that seems to be recalcitrant, you know, dig a little deeper into those patients because often our patients with Thyroid Eye Disease will have dry eye, will have what looks like allergic conjunctivitis, but they won't have papillae. So a lot of times these patients are actually in our clinics, and we can have a huge role in diagnosing the patient, getting them started with a Thyroid Eye Disease team, which we can be a part of, and recruiting an endocrinologist as well as an oculoplastic surgeon to help manage the patient. So I just want to encourage you to explore more into Thyroid Eye Disease, and I'm looking forward to sharing more information about it.

And I'm really excited to share that we are going to be having our first ocular aesthetics full surgical day at NSUOCO. So it's going to be at the Northeastern State College of Optometry, located in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. And we are really excited about this program because, as we have seen in the last 5 to 10 years, ocular aesthetics has really started to expand into optometry, and we want to be able to fully invest in our students and their education. And so we're going to be teaching this 8 to 10 hour course, looking at things like neurotoxin, radiofrequency, IPL, laser resurfacing, radiofrequency with microneedling, all of those things are going to be encompassed into this program for our fourth year students.