I have written about this before, but I saw a new article about it, so I decided to revisit the topic. In the July 2024 edition of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Paola Rivera and colleagues published a study showing that patient anxiety is reduced by playing music in the operating room. I…

It is known that, over the years, astigmatism changes. It changes from what is called “with-the-rule astigmatism” to “against-the-rule astigmatism.” Who made up “the rule,” anyway? I don’t know. =) Dr. Ken Hayashi and colleagues published a study in the July 2024 edition of the journal Cornea that showed that, at least in a Japanese…

Last week, I wrote about a study that showed that aspirin was not really helpful in macular degeneration. This week, we will focus on diabetic retinopathy. Diabetes can cause problems in the retina; this is why patients with diabetes are advised to have dilated eye exams. If there is bleeding or are blood vessel changes…

In the July 2024 edition of JAMA Ophthalmology, Dr. Liubov Robman and colleagues published a study about aspirin. The subject of the investigation was whether aspirin could stop the start of macular degeneration or the progression of existing macular degeneration. There are some nuances to the data, but the overall conclusion is that aspirin does…

I recently saw on an ophthalmology forum that a 25-year-old boxer had a cataract. Cataracts can easily form at younger ages in cases of trauma to the eye. In a boxer in the third decade of life, it’s a virtual certainty the cataract was formed from blows to the eye. Apparently, he is curious when…

When we do cataract surgery, the complication rate is quite low. In fact, it is less than one percent. That basically means that it never happens, right? Well, the risk for any individual patient is definitely low, but one percent theoretically affects 1 patient out of 100. We do several hundred surgeries per year, so…

When a patient comes in with a ruptured eyeball, my plan usually centers around stitching the hole closed and not much else. In the June 2024 edition of the journal Cornea, Dr. Lindsay Foley and colleagues published a study showing that different doctors have different opinions on how to approach the surgery. It is interesting…

In the June 2024 edition of JAMA Ophthalmology, a group from China published a study about using low levels of red light to slow the progression of nearsightedness. Nearsightedness tends to be a bigger problem in East Asia than it is in the rest of the world. That is why studies in China tend to…

During cataract surgery, the basic objective is to take the cataract out of its capsule and place a new lens implant in that capsule. There is some debate about whether taking every last fiber of the cataract out of the capsule is optimal, but it inherently makes sense to me that we should get as…

Many people getting ready to have cataract surgery ask me, “Do I have to have a physical before my cataract surgery?” Well, it really matters what one means by “have to.” There are numerous studies that indicate that, for the purpose of upcoming eye surgery, there isn’t much benefit to the physical. However, it is…