Options for Cataract Patients
Description
Cataract Treatments
Astigmatism can be corrected during cataract surgery in two ways. For low levels of astigmatism, it’s common to do a limbal-relaxing excision during the cataract procedure. This relaxes tension around the cornea and allows it to expand from an oval into a circle. For higher levels of astigmatism, a high-quality toric lens can be implanted. This lens implant corrects astigmatism very accurately with a non-invasive procedure.
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Dr. Cavanaugh: So there's really several options to crack astigmatism. Traditionally you can do it with glasses, but in this day and age of where we like to get people out of glasses we can have surgical options. And there's really two things that we do for astigmatism correction and surgery. One of the most common ways for low levels of astigmatism is to do what's called a, Limbal- relaxing incision and these are tiny little incisions we do during the cataract procedure at the junction of the white part and the colored part of the eye to allow the cornea to expand from an oval into a circle. It relaxes the tension in the cornea that's pulling it around and allows us to correct that very nicely. So those are, those are really a nice adjunct to the procedure. The patients that have a higher level of astigmatism we have toric lens implants, and toric lens implants are very high quality lens implants that have the astigmatism correction ground in to the tiny lens implant. And keep in mind that one of those lenses is smaller than your pinky finger. So it's a lot of technology in a small little lens. We simply implant the lens, align that to the direction in the astigmatism and it corrects the astigmatism very accurately from the inside of the eye with a very non- invasive procedure.
