What is glaucoma? Glaucoma is an umbrella term used to describe an array of eye diseases that damage the optic nerve. It is the leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide, affecting around 3 million Americans and 80 million people across the globe. This disease causes progressive...
Read More... Feb 07, 2023Cataracts
Cataracts
Cataracts are a clouding of the lens in the eye. For people suffering with cataracts, it is like looking through a fogged-up window.
Cataracts develop slowly and won’t disturb your eyesight early on, but eventually cataracts will interfere with you vision. They will make it difficult to read, drive, or see details. Eyeglasses may help with your vision at the beginning, but eventually surgery will be required.
Symptoms of cataracts include a clouded, dimmed or blurred vision, increasingly difficulty with vision at night, sensitivity to light and glare, a need for a brighter light for reading, seeing halos around lights, frequent changes in eyeglass or contact lens prescription, fading or yellowing of colours and double vision in one eye.
At first the clouding may only affect a small part of the eyes lens and you may not be aware of any vision loss. But as it develops, it will lead to more noticeable symptoms.
Cataracts develop with aging or an injury to the eye’s lens. As you age the lens in the eye become less transparent, less flexible and it will become thicker. Tissues within the lens breakdown and clump together, clouding small areas within the lens. The clouding will get denser as the cataract develops and will cover a larger part of the lens. Cataracts usually develop in both eyes, but often at different times, causing differences in vision of the two eyes.
The only effective treatment for cataracts is surgery. Once the cataracts begin to affect the quality of your life, your doctor will recommend surgery. Fortunately, it is a safe surgery that involves removing the clouded lens and replacing it with a clear artificial lens. The lens will be positioned in the same place as your natural one and will become a part of your eye. The surgery will usually be performed as an outpatient surgery, which means you won’t have to stay in hospital. The area of the eye will be numbed with a local anaesthetic and you will be awake during the surgery.
If surgery is necessary in both eyes, your doctor will usually schedule the second surgery after the first eye has healed, this is within about eight weeks. The surgery can carry a risk of infection and bleeding.
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