A flawed cornea?

This beautiful young spaniel comes to you with irritated eyes. Can you see what might be the problem?

Its a bit tricky to see without magnification, so here it is closer up..

This is a dermoid, an aberrant area of skin, often haired as here, on what should be transparent cornea. There’s one in the other eye too…


Both can be removed relatively simply with a superficial keratectomy and should pose no further problems. These are unlikely to be inherited in a simple mendelian fashion although breeds such as the German Shepherd dog are predisposed, though I must say I haven’t seen a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with one before!

This entry was posted in Cases. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.