Always Learning

One of the best things about ophthalmology and medicine in general is that there are always people adding new knowledge to the field. I recently experienced this firsthand. After patients get cataract surgery, they usually get eye drops to take at home. One of the types of drops that we give is an anti-inflammatory steroid eye drop to promote healing. One of the things that can happen due to those steroid eye drops is increased eye pressure. Anecdotally, I always thought that post-operative drop regimens including difluprednate caused higher eye pressures than regimens that used prednisolone (difluprednate and prednisolone are steroids). In a recent article by Tijunelis et al., it was shown that difluprednate does not necessarily cause worse eye pressure problems after cataract surgery than prednisolone. One of the important caveats is that different amounts of each drop were used after cataract surgery in the study, so part of the reason that difluprednate didn’t cause higher pressure than prednisolone was that it was not given as often post-operatively. However, since less drops of difluprednate are usually used post-operatively in practice as well, this study showed me that my fear of difluprednate-induced high eye pressure is probably not as big a problem as I thought it was. It is always great to learn something new like this.