Cataract Surgery
An intraocular lens or IOL is used to replace the cataract patient's clouded natural lens.
When symptoms first begin to appear, you may be able to improve your vision using glasses, bifocals, magnification, appropriate lighting or other aids.
When your cataracts have progressed enough to seriously impair your vision and affect your daily life, it’s time to consider surgery. Many people consider poor vision an inevitable fact of aging, but cataract surgery is a safe procedure to help regain vision.
Cataract surgery has a high success rate for improving vision. The vast majority of the more than 3 million patients that have the surgery annually, regain very good vision, somewhere between 20/20 and 20/40.
With advances in technology, patients who have cataract surgery now have the opportunity to choose lens implants that are designed to provide distance as well as up close vision without galsses.
Traditional IOLs are monofocal, (they offer vision at one distance only). But traditional IOLs require that you wear eyeglasses or contact lenses in order to read, use a computer or view objects in the middle distance.
The new multifocal and accommodating IOLs offer the possibility of seeing at more than one distance, without glasses or contacts.
ReStor uses apodized diffractive technology —it responds to how wide or small the eye's pupil might be — to provide near, intermediate and distance vision.
Clinical studies showed that 80 percent of people who received the lens didn't use glasses for any activities after their cataract surgery; 84 percent who received the lens in both eyes had distance vision of 20/25 or better.
ReZoom is a multifocal refractive IOL that distributes light over five optical zones to provide near, intermediate and distance vision.
In a study of patients, 93 percent of ReZoom recipients reported never or only occasionally needing glasses.
Crystalens was designed to restore the eye's accommodation ability (focusing ability), which is gradually reduced as presbyopia progresses. In a recent FDA study, 98% of people who had the Crystalens HD Lens implanted in both eyes could read newspaper size print without glasses after one year.—As with multifocal IOLs, distance vision with the Crystalens tends to be very good. Crystalens is designed to move within the eye, to provide focusing at all distances.
Toric lens implants are designed to eliminate astigmatism at the time of surgery and proide glasses free distance vision. One would still need to use reading glasses to see up close.
