Disorder description and treatment principle

Cataract – clouding of the eye` s lens

Cataracts are mostly related to higher age even though they can occur also in young people or even children. At the early age it arises due to eg. an injury, or when there is a metabolic disfunction; it may, however, be also congenital. Nowadays, cataract becomes more and more frequent a problem. Clouding of the lens affects creating a high-quality image on the retina.

The only possible treatment is replacement of the clouded lens by an artificial intraocular lens. More than 70 000 cataracts are operated on in the Czech Republic each year. Our clinic is, thanks to Dr. Pavel Stodůlka, renowned for carrying out microincision cataract surgeries.

Cataract treatment

You would have to spend many days in hospital after cataract surgery being it 25 years ago, and then, for the rest of your life, you would have to wear strong glasses. The development in operation procedures, in technology as well as in materials has brought considerable progress for cataract surgery itself, has increased the patient-friendliness of the surgery, and markedly shortened the time of the follow-up treatment. Cataract surgeries are now ambulant operations; one lasts about 20 minutes and the patients are able to go home on their own immediately after the operation.
Only eye drops are used for anaesthesia, less frequently anaesthesia is in the form of a small injection. In small children or in people with some sort of a mental disorder complete anaesthesia is used. What is very important is the size of the incision through which the surgery is carried out. The best surgeons today, including those from Gemini Eye Center, use sc. microincision for the surgery, ie. incision of a size of about 2mm. The main advantage of microincision cataract surgery is the healing speed and high-quality of the final vision because the small incision and healing that follows do not change the natural curvature of the eye.

Today, the eye surgeons and their patients have a large range of artificial intraocular lenses at disposal for cataract surgery. They only differ in material from which they are made, and in their shapes. Acrylate seems to be the best possible material; the eye tolerates it perfectly and it allows manufacturing of appropriately shaped lenses. There are only some intraocular lenses that may be used for microincision surgery.