To develop clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for prevention, diagnosis, treatment and follow up of ocular injuries due to mustard gas exposure.

Four tables were used to develop the CPGs. The clinical questions were designed by the guideline team and inserted into table 1. Websites and databases such as National Guidelines Clearinghouse, National Institute for Clinical Excellence, Cochrane, PubMed (Clinical queries) were searched to find related CPGs and explore possible answers to the clinical questions. Since there were no relevant CPGs in the literature, related Persian and English language articles were extracted. The guideline team summarized each piece of article along with its level of evidence in table 2. Consequently, they developed recommendations considering the clinical benefits and side effects in table 3. The recommendations were re-evaluated in terms of customization criteria in table 4. All recommendations along with the related evidence were sent to experts in this field all over the country to score them from 1 to 9. These scores were employed for determining the level of agreement.

An agreement was achieved for all recommendations. The experts presented a number of minor modifications which were applied to the recommendations. Finally, CPGs were developed including 98 recommendations under three major sections including prevention of injury, and diagnostic and therapeutic aspects of ocular injury in the acute and delayed phases of exposure to mustard gas.

Considering the lack of CPGs for ocular injury due to mustard gas exposure, these commendations might be useful to prevent the serious ocular complications of mustard gas and standardize eye care services to affected individuals.