Functional vision improves more in monocular than binocular patients after cataract surgery

Following cataract surgery, monocular patients reported twice as much improvement in functional vision as binocular patients, according to a retrospective study.

Marcela L. Pomberg, MD, and Kevin M. Miller, MD, of the Jules Stein Eye Institute in Los Angeles studied the changes in functional vision after cataract surgery in 100 functionally monocular patients and 100 binocularly sighted patients. The binocular patients, who acted as control subjects, were matched to the monocular patients by age, sex and surgery time. All patients underwent phacoemulsification.

The monocular group had significantly worse mean best corrected visual acuity than the binocular group both before and after surgery. The improvement experienced by the two groups was not statistically significant. Despite this similarity, the improvement reported in a visual function questionnaire was significantly greater in the monocular than the binocular group.

The study authors noted that the monocular participants underwent surgery on their better eye, whereas the binocular participants generally had surgery on their weaker eye, and this may have influenced the study’s findings.

The study is published in the July issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology.