Juvenile idiopathic arthritis-associated uveitis: clinical features and complications, risk factors for severe course, and visual outcome.

Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is the most common childhood rheumatic disease and the most prevalent systemic disorder in children with uveitis. The risk of developing uveitis is the greatest among patients with oligoarticular onset of disease. Clinical features of JIA-associated uveitis (JIAU) are nongranulomatous inflammation, anterior in location, insidious at onset, chronic course, and frequently asymptomatic in the absence of ocular structural complications. Uveitis in JIA can worsen over time with many sight-threatening complications, such as band keratopathy in the visual axis, posterior synechiae, cataract, secondary glaucoma, macular edema, hypotony, epiretinal membrane, and optic nerve edema. Different studies have pointed out that several factors are associated with poor prognosis, including young age at onset, male gender, short interval between diagnosis of arthritis and uveitis, severity of uveitis at onset, and antinuclear antibody (ANA) positivity. Although JIA associated-uveitis is still a serious blinding disease, we are at least able to identify the high-risk group.