Dear Colleagues
Welcome to the first Edition of Ocular Immunology and Inflammation for 2014. As usual, for this first edition I would like both to reflect on what we have achieved over the last 12 months, and to look forward to the coming year.
In 2009, we introduced the concept of “Disease of the Year”. Last year this was “Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) induced uveitis”. As usual we started the series with the “Controversy” for which we had sent a questionnaire about epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical features, diagnostic approach and treatment of JIA uveitis to experts in the field. The results showed a lot of agreement regarding diagnostics, but less uniform regimen for the treatment. My thanks go to the Editors of this project: Ilknur Tugal-Tutkun, Joke deBoer, Doug Jabs and Arnd Heiligenhaus.
In 2014, we will continue our systematic coverage of ocular inflammatory conditions with “Ocular Tuberculosis”, our “Disease of the Year”, another all-time classic. One of the special challenges will be to analyse the difference between TB in endemic and non-endemic countries. As usual we will start the series with the results of a survey of uveitis specialists intended to highlight areas of consensus and controversy (planned for the coming issue). This will then be followed by a series of the epidemiology, pathophysiology, clinical features, diagnostic approach, differential diagnosis and treatment of tuberculosis. Editors for this series will be Soon-Phaik Chee, Ilknur Tugal-Tutkun, Emmett Cunningham, Amod Gupta, Narsing Rao and James Rosenbaum.
I want to thank Russell N. van Gelder who has written the regular section of “Journal Watch”, for several years. This has become a highly informative section for our readers. For the future we will have two authors for that section, one for external ocular disease, and one for intraocular disease. Esen K. Akpek from The Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, will take care for external ocular inflammation, Emmett Cunningham, Stanford University and California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco, for intraocular inflammation.
Therefore we hope to continue to provide our readers with the highest quality articles and reviews from the field of ocular immunology and inflammation. Thank you for your continuing support.
Manfred Zierhut
Editor-in-Chief Ocular Immunology and Inflammation