Is There an Increased Prevalence of Asteroid Hyalosis in Eyes with Uveal Melanoma? A Histopathologic Study.

During the planning meeting for the Collaborative Ocular Melanoma Study (COMS) prior to the start of patient recruitment in 1986, there was an interest expressed in determining whether a relationship existed between the presence of uveal melanoma (UM) and asteroid hyalosis (AH). To answer this question, the ophthalmic examination form (unlike the pathology form for enucleated eyes) for each COMS patient asked whether AH was present or not. Though an increased prevalence was not found, this result was never published. A recent unpublished study at the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine indicated a higher prevalence of AH in canine eyes with UM when compared to control eyes (without tumor) enucleated for goniodysgenesis. This further increased our interest in revisiting the published literature, clinical records, and histopathology slides of the enucleated eyes from the COMS study, as well as the histopathology slides on file in the University of Wisconsin Eye Pathology Laboratory. While cases with both AH and UM were occasionally encountered in the literature, clinically, we could not find a previous study focusing on these two processes. This study was conducted to explore whether such an association exists.