Histopathology and treatment of a huge overhanging filtering bleb

BACKGROUND: The giant filtering bleb encroaching onto the corneal surface is a rare occurrence in our and other’s clinical experience (Kapoor and Syed, Int. Ophthalmol 31(5):403–404, 2011), even in patients having had a trabeculectomy with mitomycin C, and how it developed is debated. In this paper, we report a patient who developed a huge overhanging filtering bleb after trabeculectomy, and present our intraoperative photographs, histopathology and immunohistochemistry results. CASE PRESENTATION: A 62-year-old female visited our hospital due to the giant filtering bleb encroaching onto the corneal surface which was about 6 mm × 8 mm × 3 mm. We dissected the filtering bleb from the cornea and present the histopathology and immunohistochemistry results of it. CONCLUSION: The results from histopathology and immunohistochemistry in this study are consistent with the filtering cicatrix hypothesis. However, our finding that the overhanging blebs had tight connections with the corneal tissue or corneoscleral limbus, rather than simply leaning on it, might be highly related to their development and still needs to be further studied. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12886-016-0353-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.