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Hydrogel inlays can help optimize outcomes for presbyopic patients

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NEW YORK — Careful patient selection and proper surgical techniques can help hydrogel inlays improve outcomes for the correction of presbyopia, according to a speaker here.

“Patient selection is key with these. Your surgical technique can improve your outcomes, and you need to continue to monitor for haze and treat that early,” Priyanka Sood, MD, said at OSN New York 2017.

The best patients to receive hydrogel inlays are those who feel their loss of near vision is “a significant difficulty or disability in their life,” Sood said. Patients should have similar topographical criteria to those who would be LASIK candidates and tend to do better if they have a slightly hyperopic manifest refraction, preferably about +0.5 D or +0.75 D, she said.

Additionally, mitomycin C can help improve outcomes if used intraoperatively. A study presented at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, showed patients experienced reduced rates of corneal haze if MMC was used intraoperatively compared with patients who underwent procedures with no MMC. The study revealed no adverse events and no change in endothelial cell counts in the patients, she said.

“With postoperative management, wound healing is an issue. Whenever we put a foreign body in the cornea, it will try to encapsulate it and potentially cause stromal haze, thickening, changes in the corneal curvature. If you’re talking about an inlay in the center of the visual axis, that can lead to a decline in the vision,” she said. – by Robert Linnehan

References:

Sood P. Optimizing outcomes with the hydrogel inlay. Presented at: OSN New York 2017; Oct. 20 to 22, 2017; New York.

Theng J. Combined LASIK and a transparent shape-changing corneal inlay with mitomycin C (MMC). E-poster. Presented at: European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons meeting; Oct. 7 to 11, 2017; Lisbon, Portugal.

Disclosure: Sood reports no relevant disclosures.