Ocular Defects in Thalidomide Babies.

IN the early reports on congenital abnormalities in thalidomide babies in Great Britain little attention has been paid to the occurrence of ocular defects. A recent survey by the Chief Medical Officer of the Ministry of Health relating to children born with congenital limb deformities during 1960-62, revealed that there were 652 surviving children with such deformities, 244 of whose mothers had definitely or possibly taken thalidomide during pregnancy. Of the children born to these 244 mothers, 146 had gross deformities or absence of two, three, or four limbs, and these included 27 with additional deformities, two-thirds of which affected the eyes or ears or both. Of the remainder 45 had deformities of one limb only, and a further 53 had minor deformities of the hands or feet or both. Gilkes and Strode (1963) have reported on the ocular findings in twenty children with limb deformities of the thalidomide type at Chailey Heritage, Sussex, and they discovered colobomatous defects in five of them. A colobomatous defect is the typical eye deformity to be expected in thalidomide children and can easily be missed unless specifically looked for. In Edinburgh, in the Summer of 1962, a thalidomide baby (Case 1) was found to have ocular defects. Since then, through the courtesy of Mr. D. W. Lamb, a further eleven thalidomide babies, three males and eight females, who attend a special clinic at the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital, Edinburgh, have been examined and we have found typical colobomatous defects in two of these, giving a total of three such deformities in twelve children, again an incidence of 25 per cent.