Moving into the area of laser eye surgery, this week we are going to look at the cataract surgery procedure. Advice before, during and after the surgery will be detailed in next week’s health tip.
Cataract is the disease which manifests itself by the clouding of the crystalline and leads to decreased vision; leaving this untreated, may cause complications that can lead to blindness. The only effective treatment against cataract is SURGERY, which involves replacing the damaged lens with a new, artificial lens.
The surgical technique used by our partners – Opticristal Clinic – is a next-generation technique based on ultrasound, called phacoemulsification. Phacoemulsification is done to replace the crystalline with a foldable artificial crystalline whit spheric, aspheric and multi-focal lens. The spheric one offers clear vision at one distance only (far, intermediate or near). The aspheric gives around 30% better contrast – it corrects irregularities in the curvature of the eye, for enhanced image quality. The multi-focal lens allows patients to see clearly at any distance, without reading or bifocal glasses; the quality of the image is significantly improved due to the aspheric design of the multi-focal IOL.
A specialist nurse will take care of the patient’s preoperative preparation, administering special eye-drops several times in order to dilate the pupil and disinfect the eye which will undergo surgery.
The surgery will start with the administration of a local anaesthetic (for the lower eyelid), performed by a specialist anesthetist. Then, the ophthalmologist will proceed to execute a 2.0 mm incision in the cornea (upper eye) and will start the cataract’s phacoemulsification by using ultrasound, which is a totally painless procedure. Once the damaged lens has been removed, the surgeon will insert the replacement IOL (Intra Ocular Lens) inside the eye. The IOL’s diopter is set in advance, for each patient, using a measuring technique called biometrics. Typically, the IOL is rolled up into the tip of an injector tool, so that it can be inserted through the same tiny incision. Once inserted, the IOL unfolds perfectly onto its place.
After the surgery, the patient will have improved distance vision (reserved opinion in the case of existing previous disease of the retina or the optic nerve), but will however be more likely to wear glasses for close-viewing such as reading glasses.
Like any other surgery, the cataract operation has certain risks attached, risks that may be extremely rare, but vital. During MD. Pacurar Catalina’s (Opticristal Clinic owner and the acting ophtalmologist) practice to date, this unfortunate event has not happened. In practice, few incidents occurred during cataract surgeries, and are mainly due to other diseases (heart disease, etc). MD Pacurar Catalina has completed over 10,000 successful cataract surgeries in her career so far. Thanks to the use of modern techniques, these risks are minimised. Generally speaking, specialists relate very few cases of intraocular haemorrhage, corneal damages or ruptures of the crystalline’s posterior capsule as complications of this surgery.
Come back for next week’s entry on pre-op and post-op care to understand more about cataract surgery.
Related posts:
ShareThis
thank you for the interesting write up