Corneal Avascularity and Vascularity

Abstract

The cornea normally lacks blood vessels, but in numerous diverse natural and experimental situations, capillaries extend into this tissue from the pericorneal vascular plexus. The avascularity of the normal cornea and its vascularization in certain pathologic states have attracted attention for at least the better part of almost two centuries (372,767). During the early part of the twentieth century the cornea was used in studies of angiogenesis in humans (28,102,428,430) and during the 1920’s and 1930’s animals were used to study new vessel formation in the cornea (191,389–391,733). However, the first attempts to investigate the pathogenesis of corneal vascularization in depth were only made in 1949 by Campbell and Michaelson (116) and Cogan (143).