[Ophthalmologic symptoms of multiple sclerosis].

Long-term clinical studies of 220 patients with disseminated sclerosis and different pathology of the optico-nervous apparatus demonstrated that neuritis of the optic nerve is not always accompanied by impairment of vision and sometimes may lead to ophthalmological symptomatology. This symptomatology may be similar to the picture of congested disks of optic nerves. It was established that the appearance of the disk of theoptic nerve in the postneuritic condition is determined by a combination of a substitutive (due to the destruction of nervous fibers and consequently to an irreversible loss of vision) and resorbtive (due to a resorbtion of inflammation products) fibrogliosis. The second process, depending upon the nearness of the inflammational focus to the eye ground and the duration of the nerve disorder, does not reflect the irreversible loss of visual functions and leads to a discrepancy between the ophthalmological and visual changes. This discrepancy is aggravated by the possibility of a long-term preservation of the axons and as a result an absence of substitutive scarring, even in an irreversible loss of vision.