This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Study suggests better short-term UCVA improvement with PRK than butterfly LASEK

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Butterfly LASEK and PRK appear to share similar predictability, efficacy, stability and haze incidence for treating low to moderate myopia, but PRK may provide better short-term improvement in uncorrected visual acuity, a prospective study found.

Vinícius Coral Ghanem, MD, and colleagues randomly assigned 102 eyes of 51 patients to undergo PRK in one eye and butterfly LASEK in the fellow eye. The study results are published in the September issue of Journal of Refractive Surgery.

The investigators identified no significant difference in distance UCVA between both surgery groups; however, PRK eyes showed a better distance UCVA than butterfly LASEK eyes at 2 days postop (P = .025).

At 1-year postop, 50 eyes (98%) in the PRK group and 49 eyes (96.1%) in the butterfly LASEK group had achieved a UCVA of 20/20, the authors reported.

"Predictability, efficacy, safety, and stability were not statistically significant between groups," they said.

At 1 year, 48 eyes (94.1%) in the PRK and 44 eyes (86.3%) in the butterfly LASEK groups had achieved a spherical equivalent refraction of ±0.5 D (P = .188), according to the study.

Eyes in the butterfly LASEK group had a significantly higher haze intensity (0.18) than eyes in the PRK group (0.08) at 1 month (P = .04); however there were no significant differences between groups at any other time during follow-up.