One retinal disease that all eye doctors know about is retinitis pigmentosa (RP). It is a very common inherited retinal disease, and, in some ways, may be thought of as the quintessential inherited retinal disease. Unfortunately, there is no good treatment for it. As an ophthalmologic community, we have heard a lot about use of…

One of the most dreaded moments during cataract surgery is the discovery of zonular instability. The zonules hold the capsule in place. The capsule contains the cataract. Since the goal of cataract surgery is usually to take the cataract out of the capsule and the place an artificial lens implant into the capsule, having a…

I often hear from cataract surgery patients that they don’t want to “ruin their surgery” and have to “do it again.” Well, it turns out that you can’t have cataract surgery again, and any further surgery is usually much more involved and risky. For example, in the February edition of the Journal of Cataract &…

In the February 2025 edition of the Journal Ophthalmology, Dr. Yael Lustig-Barzelay and colleagues published a study about xanthelasma and dyslipidemia. Xanthelasmas of the eyelids are fairly common; they are yellow plaques that frequently form on the nasal side of the eyelids. They are fatty deposits, so there have been studies that have tried to…

In the February 2025 edition of the Journal Cornea, Dr. Tae Eun Lee and colleagues published a study regarding Herpes Simplex virus. The study included over 8 million people. Herpes Simplex virus can cause a recurrent disease of the cornea. The study authors found that those who received Covid-19 vaccination had a higher chance of…

I sometimes have to talk to my patients about corneal transplants. I explain that this is, indeed, a literal transplant, in which someone else’s cornea gets placed in their eye. Where do the corneas come from? They come from donors! The processing of the tissue is done by eye banks, which recover, store, and distribute…

In the January 2025 issue of the journal Ophthalmology, Dr. Tiarnan Keenan and colleagues published a study about vitamin use in macular degeneration. Over the last couple of years, there has been a lot of interest in medications used to decrease geographic atrophy progression. Geographic atrophy is a manifestation of macular degeneration, and there are…

In the January 2025 issue of the Journal of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, Dr. Rhaissa Menelau and colleagues published an article about deposits on hydrophilic acrylic lens implants. When we perform cataract surgery, we remove the cataract, which is the natural lens of the eye, and replace it with a lens implant. Those implants, as…

It is a common experience, one that many of us are familiar with–you step out on a cold day, and you can’t see through your glasses anymore. The key element that causes the fogging is the temperature change. With the rapid temperature change, condensation forms on the lenses. Looking through the condensation is literally looking…

Curcumin is a biologically active ingredient in turmeric, and is thus a common part of the South Asian diet. In the December 2024 issue of JAMA Ophthalmology, Dr. Amer Alsoudi and colleagues published a study about people taking curcuma-based nutritional supplements and macular degeneration. In this study, patients taking curcuma-based nutritional supplements were found to…