FRCOphth Part 1 Pathology & Microbiology

General pathology comes first: cell injury and cell death, acute and chronic inflammation, wound healing and repair, and the principles of neoplasia. Ocular pathology then applies that machinery to corneal dystrophies and degenerations, uveal melanoma, retinoblastoma, and the lid and orbital lesions you will meet again later in training. Learn the general process before the ocular example. Questions are built on the mechanism and use the eye as the setting, so the examples attach easily once the process underneath is secure.

Microbiology covers the organisms that actually cause eye disease, including staphylococci, streptococci, Pseudomonas, herpes simplex and varicella zoster, adenovirus, Acanthamoeba, filamentous fungi, Candida and Chlamydia. Add sterilisation and disinfection and the mechanisms behind the main antimicrobial classes. Immunology covers innate and adaptive responses, the four hypersensitivity types, ocular immune privilege, autoimmunity and corneal graft rejection. Both halves are heavily factual and both tend to get left until the end, which is the wrong order given how much material they hold.

Split the domain into its three parts and drill each one separately rather than treating it as a single enormous topic. Work exam-style SBAs on general pathology first so the mechanisms are solid, then use the referenced explanations to hang the ocular examples off them. For microbiology and immunology, where recall is most of the task, spaced repetition does considerably more work than re-reading, and the AI tutor is useful for tracing which step of an immune pathway you actually lost.