A total of 865 articles were identified through database searches. After eliminating duplicate studies, 836 titles and abstracts, and 102 full-text articles were screened. A total of 42 studies with 52 patients were included in this manuscript (Fig. 1) [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62]. Studies reporting on VKH-like panuveitis symptoms not attributed to immune checkpoint inhibitors or reactions or VKH-like uveitis triggered by other medications were excluded [45, 63,64,65].

Flow diagram of literature search and selection of studies according to PRISMA

Of the studies included, 29 (69.0%) were case reports [20, 22, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33,34,35,36, 38,39,40,41,42,43,44, 46,47,48, 50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57, 62]. Six (14.3%) were case series [23, 24, 29, 30, 37, 49]. Four (9.5%) were observational studies reporting individual patient characteristics [58,59,60,61]. These reports were spread across many different institutions around the world, with the majority originating from Japan (n = 15, 35.7%) and the United States (n = 14, 33.3%). The characteristics of the remaining reports are found in Table 2.

The demographics of the patients reported in the studies are summarized in Table 3. The mean age was 60.0 ± 11.9 years old, and the majority of patients were female (61.5%). The ethnicities of the patients were unreported for 51.9% of the studies included. Of those reporting ethnicities, Caucasian patients (n = 13, 25.0%) made up the majority [20, 22, 24, 26, 33, 36, 40, 58, 59], followed by Asian (n = 10, 19.2%) [21, 30, 51, 60, 61] and Hispanic patients (n = 2, 3.8%) [44, 47]. The type of cancer for which ICI was indicated was melanoma [20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,