Pupil size, aberrations not correlated with visual complaints

WASHINGTON — Patients’ complaints about their vision were not related to their pupil sizes or levels of higher-order aberrations, according to a study presented here.

Shachar Tauber, MD, administered a questionnaire to 37 patients before refractive surgery to determine whether higher-order aberrations were clinically significant across pupil sizes.

”There was no correlation between subjective visual complaints, pupil size or degree of myopia [preoperatively] and higher-order aberration measurements,” he said here at the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery meeting.

Dr. Tauber used the questionnaire to assess patients’ subjective visual complaints, and he also recorded pupil sizes and degrees of refractive error. All patients had best corrected visual acuities of 20/20, he said.

“We found … [that] eyes with natural super-vision (better than 20/15) had the same number of higher-order aberrations as those who had specific visual complaints,” he said.

The average pupil size was 5.9 mm in his patient group, the mean spherical equivalent was –3.74 D, and the mean root mean square of higher-order aberrations was 0.43 µm, he said.

“We could not correlate higher-order aberrations to visual differences or to night driving,” he said.

The “smallest” correlation was found between higher-order aberrations and visual complaints in patients who wore glasses and had a larger pupil diameter (greater than 6 mm) and in those who wore contact lenses but had smaller pupil diameters.