New surgery for eye correction?!

New surgery for eye correction?

I'm extremely nearsighted, and my doctors have told me that laser most likely won't work on me. However, he told me that right now there's a new experiment where they put an actual lense into your eye to correct your vision. He said that most likely this was the only thing that was going to help me. Anybody hear about this yet?

Yes. It is called clear lens extraction. Whereas most times the lens of the eye is removed to deal with a clouded lens called a cataract, we are finding that the best way sometimes to deal with extremely large prescription errors is to remove the lens of the eye (just as in a cataract surgery) and replace the lens with a man made lens. The length of your eye would be measured pre surgically with an ultrasound unit and your lens would be replaced with the appropriate powered intraocular lens implant that would correct your extreme nearsightedness. It is a very proven surgery and I believe would be effective.

That's the good news. Now the bad news. First, by removing you lens, you will lose all ability to change the focus of your eyes. This would require you to use reading glasses for all near vision activities such as reading, computer, etc. Some surgeons will attempt to moderate the severity of your loss in near vision capabily by performing a monovision implantation (this is where the surgeon implants a replacement lens in one eye to allow clear vision at distance and implants a replacement lens in the other to allow clear vision at near.) Before committing to this option I would recommend you try it with a contact lens first to see if you can tolerate the two eyes not focusing together. Works for some but not for others.

There is also a new implantable lens called a Crystalens which can allow you to maintain some of your ability to focus on near point objects. It will not be as effective at reading as before the surgery but many patients are able to see adequately at near for most tasks and only need to use reading glasses for fine print.

The negative of losing your near point focusing ability is really not an issue, though, if you are over 40 or very close to 40. That is because EVERYONE progressively loses the ability to focus at near beginning around age 40 and progressively loses all near point focusing ability by about age 55 or so. So, if you have already lost your focusing ability or are about to lose it due to aging, I'm not really sure there are a lot of negatives to having a clear lens extraction. I have several patients who are very happy with their results. Hope this was of some help.