What Is Blepharitis

While dry eye is a complex disease with many moving parts, there are definitely some known causes of dryness and irritation. Many of these causes are actually very common. One such cause is blepharitis.

As with most conditions that end in “-itis”, blepharitis involves inflammation. Specifically, if we break down the word, inflammation of the “bleph”. Ok, that’s not exactly helpful. It’s actually inflammation of the margin of the eyelid, but eyelid-itis sounds kinda weird.

Long side note: There are actually two different categories of blepharitis, one for the front of the eyelid margin or anterior blepharitis and one for the back of the eyelid margin involving the oil glands called posterior blepharitis. As posterior blepharitis has become more understood, it has started to take on a different term called meibomian gland dysfunction to more accurately describe exactly what it is. So today, blepharitis typically refers to the anterior one.

Everyone always thinks all bacteria is bad, but there actually exists bacteria that live normally on our skin without bothering us. But sometimes this bacteria can actually give us some problems. Blepharitis is a result of an overgrowth of this normal bacteria. When this occurs, this bacteria can start to secrete chemicals into our tear films; this isn’t great and causes the tear film to break up. This in turn causes cause red and irritated dry eye.

Blepharitis is actually quite common. Many people even have blepharitis without even realizing it or without having any symptoms from it. But treating blepharitis is just one of the many tools we have at our disposal in order to combat dry eye.

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