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No this is not a late-night personal injury lawyer infomercial.
This is a recommendation that you have your LASIK records available, for your own good, later in life.
There are 2 million cataract surgeries done yearly in the U.S. and the odds are, if you live long enough, you will eventually need cataract surgery, too.
What does this have to do with LASIK surgery?
When doctors perform cataract surgery they remove the cataract, which is the lens of your eye that has become cloudy. And they replace that lens with an artificial lens called an Intraocular Lens implant (IOL).
The IOL needs to have a strength to it to match your eye so that things are in focus without the need for strong prescription eyeglasses.
Currently, we determine what strength the IOL needs to be by using formulas that mostly depend on the measurements of the curvature of the cornea and the length of the eye.
Those formulas work best when the cornea is its natural shape -- i.e., not previously altered in shape from LASIK.
If you plug the “new” post-LASIK corneal shape into the formulas, the IOL strength that comes out is often significantly off the strength you really need to see well.
This is where having your records becomes important.
Knowing what your eyeglass prescription and corneal shape were BEFORE you had LASIK greatly improves our formula’s ability to predict the correct implant strength.
In most states there is a limit to how long a doctor needs to keep your
Read more: If you've had LASIK, Get a Copy of Your Eye Records ASAP!
The Background
Over the last several years, research has indicated a strong correlation between the presence of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and glaucoma. Information from some of these pivotal studies is presented below.
Did you know
- Glaucoma affects over 60 million people worldwide and almost 3 million people in the U.S.
- There are many people who have glaucoma but have not yet had it diagnosed.
- Glaucoma is a leading cause of blindness in the United States.
- If glaucoma is not detected and goes untreated, it can result in peripheral vision loss and irreversible blindness.
- Sleep apnea is a condition that obstructs breathing during sleep.
- It affects 100 million people around the globe and around 25 million people in the U.S.
- A blocked airway can cause loud snoring, gasping, or choking because breathing stops for up to two minutes.
- Poor sleep due to sleep apnea results in morning headaches and chronic daytime sleepiness.
The Studies
In January 2016, a meta-analysis by Liu et. al., reviewed studies that collectively encompassed 2,288,701 individuals over six studies. Review of the data showed that if an individual has OSA there is an increased risk of glaucoma that ranged anywhere from 21% to 450% depending on the study.
Later in 2016, a study by Shinmei et al. measured the intraocular pressure in subjects with OSA while they slept and had episodes of apnea. Somewhat surprisingly, they found that when the subjects were demonstrating apnea during sleep, their eye pressures were actually lower than when the events were not happening.
This does not
