Post-LASIK Complications

One of the biggest fears that a surgeon has when performing laser vision correction is that a patient will develop post-LASIK ectasia. Ectasia is the word used to describe a cornea that thins and bulges out. A big issue with ectasia is that sometimes glasses can’t correct vision. Patients might require hard contact lenses or even cornea transplant surgery, and the vision may not be perfect even with those methods. So, basically, a patient can go from having good vision with glasses to having poor vision despite glasses/contacts/surgery. And the patient would have paid good money to get there! Fortunately, ophthalmologists recognize that this is unacceptable, and a lot of work has been done to develop screening methods to try to predict who will get ectasia after laser vision correction so that they are not offered the surgery. This screening is a lot better than it once was; at one time, the surgical community had a hard time recognizing the complication even existed because laser vision correction was new technology. Now everyone knows that it is exists and screens rigorously for it, so it is very safe to get laser vision correction.