Refractive Surgery News

LAS VEGAS – Corneal collagen cross-linking is quickly becoming the first line of treatment for progressive keratoconus, Clark Chang, OD, director of specialty contact lens, Wills Eye Hospital, and director of clinical services, TLC Vision, said here at Vision Expo West.

Refractive surgery has been the focus of many recent studies ranging from how to make SMILE procedures more effective to measuring visual acuity improvements after treatment for keratoconus.

Patients with emmetropic presbyopia who underwent pulsed ciliary muscle electrostimulation demonstrated improved short-term near vision ability, according to a study.

Lowering femtosecond laser energy level to less than 115 nJ during small incision lenticule extraction can improve the surface quality of the lenticule, according to a study.

Patients with moderate to severe keratoconus who underwent a three-step procedure maintained visual acuity improvements at 2 years, according to a study.

Significant improvements were found in uncorrected distance visual acuity, manifest sphere and manifest refraction spherical equivalent at all visits after photorefractive intrastromal corneal crosslinking for the treatment of myopic refractive errors.

Surface ablation with the addition of mitomycin C is a safe and effective enhancement method after myopic SMILE, according to a study.

Small incision lenticule extraction was associated with significant increases in higher-order aberrations in a cohort of patients undergoing the procedure for myopia.

Healio/Primary Care Optometry News bloggers address primary care and health reform, surgery and comanagement, clinical and diagnostic conundrums, and the implementation of social media in the optometric practice.

Small incision lenticule extraction, or SMILE, is a procedure where a femtosecond laser is used to create an intrastromal lenticule that is surgically extracted through a small femtosecond incision, correcting even high degrees of myopia with impressive precision.