Researchers at the Singapore National Eye Center recently published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology their conclusions on the successful employment of femtosecond laser cataract surgery technique in cataract removal. The study is entitled “Clinical Outcomes in the first 2 years of Femtosecond Laser-assisted Cataract Surgery.”
Femtosecond laser cataract surgery is a promising technique that was designed to assist or replace several elements of manual cataract surgery, namely the surgical incisions in the cornea and the fragmentation of the clouded lens (cataract) in the eye.
In this study, researchers performed a nonrandomized treatment comparison with matched, historical controls of femtosecond laser cataract surgery cases 2 years after the procedure. The visual results of 420 control participants who underwent manual cataract surgery and 803 patients who underwent laser surgery were analyzed. All the surgical procedures were performed at the Singapore National Eye Centre between May 2012 and December 2013. The laser surgeries were performed with the VICTUS femtosecond laser platform (Bausch + Lomb) using 5.0 – 5.5 mm diameter laser capsulotomies and nuclear fragmentation. The research team assessed several parameters, including postoperative unaided visual acuity.
A total of 1,105 eyes from 803 patients were submitted to laser cataract surgery, with the majority of the patients being of Chinese nationality (90.9%), female (56.9%) and with a mean age of 66.1 years. Researchers found that patients who underwent femtosecond laser cataract surgery showed statistically improved unaided visual acuities in comparison with control participants (68.6% versus 56.3%). Intraoperative complications were reported, including subconjunctival hemorrhages in 26.2% (290 eyes) of the cases, ruptures of the anterior (0.81% , 9 eyes) and posterior capsule (0.27%, 3 eyes), suction loss in 0.45% (5 eyes) of the cases, and 0.09% endothelial incision (1 eye) and iris hemorrhage (1 eye). No dropped nucleus was reported.
The researchers concluded that femtosecond laser cataract surgery can improve the postoperative unaided visual acuity of the patients with a low complication rate.
“The femtosecond laser cataract surgery using the VICTUS femtosecond laser platform was found to be successful and an acceptable complication rate in a public institution where a wide variety of challenging cataract cases of varying densities were treated.” concluded the research team.
