Systemic symptoms associated with orbital venous vasculitis.

Orbital venous vasculitis has been suggested to cause characteristic periorbital pain in patients with pathologic changes in their orbital phlebograms. The orbital pain is characterized by being unilateral, not shifting side, boring and pressing, but not throbbing, increasing on eye strain, exposure to cold, or weather changes, and resistant to analgesics. It is ameliorated by steroids. Fifty patients with symptoms of orbital venous vasculitis were investigated for other symptoms that could be related to the vasculitis. When the 32 female patients were compared with a randomly selected age- and sex-matched control group, there was a significant increase of symptoms of chronic fatigue, cold feet, gut problems such as constipation and/or diarrhea, arthralgia, memory impairment, rotatory vertigo, spontaneous ecchymoses (all, p less than 0.0001), back pain (p less than 0.012), and thrombophlebitis (p less than 0.022) in the patient group. These symptoms, although commonly occurring, seem in these patients to be related to the vasculitis. Blood tests of the fifty patients showed signs of inflammation which did not disagree with the hypothesis of an immunologic cause of the orbital venous vasculitis.