Novelties in the treatment and surgery of cataracts

The cataract is the opacification of the lens that is a structure that we all have inside the eye and that allows us to focus the images on the retina. That crystalline lens under normal conditions is transparent, but over the years or as a result of another series of problems, the crystalline lens loses its transparency and becomes opaque. When it becomes opaque, that is the cataracts and it only has one solution that is the surgical solution.

Why do cataracts appear?

There are many causes of cataracts, the most frequent is age, over the years the lens becomes increasingly opaque until the patient begins to notice symptoms of loss of vision because it no longer lets the light into the interior of the eye. But there are other causes besides the age that can lead to cataracts, for example we find accidents, trauma, we can also find cataracts associated with certain medications, associated with another series of diseases such as diabetes. We can also find cataracts even congenital in children born with cataracts and who have a genetic predisposition.

Although the most common cause of this condition is age, it is true that we are observing that each time that age is earlier probably because the patient is reviewed earlier because their professional or social needs makes it a real nonsense today to wait until cataracts leave a person blind and, on the other hand, because we are also seeing the harmful effect of ultraviolet radiation from the sun that is causing a higher incidence of cataracts in younger people than usual.

What is your treatment?

The only treatment that the cataract has is surgery. If a person who has cataracts is not operated on, this cataract will progress until it causes a loss of important vision in the person so that cataracts are still the most frequent cause of reversible blindness in the world today. But it is also true that nowadays cataract surgery has advanced dramatically in such a way that today we are talking about one of the safest surgical procedures of the human being.

Today we performing the operation of cataracts with local anesthesia in drops, therefore, it is no longer necessary to sleep or puncture the patient's eye but simply with a few drops of anesthetic eye drops we can perform that intervention that lasts approximately between 10 and 15 minutes. In the operation, what we are going to do is eliminate the cataract and replace it with an intraocular lens that also allows us to correct the patient's graduation defects. Once the operation is done, the patient leaves the operating room on his own foot and it is not necessary to give points or cover the eye or the entrance but leaves and can go home a few minutes after the intervention with sunglasses of protection.