OCT posterior Segment Changes in Post-phacoemulsification myopic patients

Abstract

SUMMARY H igh axial myopia remains one of the biggest challenges in ophthalmological practice with a high susceptibility to a lot of complications after any intraocular surgery (Morita et al, 1993, Holden et al, 2015) Phacoemulsification and IOL implantation became the standard procedure for cataract extraction over the last decades. However, the risk for postoperative complications is still present. Some of them are unexplained and may be related to the posterior segment changes occurring during the surgery, especially those affecting the vitreoretinal interface. OCT is the best method for the measurement of retinal thickness and can thus be applied to detect all retinal diseases, and follow up disease progression. And hence, we used this sensitive modality in our follow up (Annie Chan et al., 2006). We chose high myopic patients as our study population to find out if the fundus changes already present in these eyes will affect the outcome of this surgical procedure or will predispose to any of its complications. We performed our study on 20 eyes of patients with high axial myopia (spherical equivalent > -6.0 D and AXL >26.5mm) complicated with cataract. The patients were collected from the outpatient clinic of Ain Shams University Hospital during the period from May to October 2015. Phacoemulsification was performed and follow up was done at the outpatient clinic. OCT was done preoperatively, 1 month and 3 months after surgery. The study proved that high myopes are high risk popualtion for developing postoperative increase in foveal thickness that doesn’t show signs of resolution over 3 months following the surgery. However, this increase doesn’t have a significant impact on visual acuity. As for other posterior segment changes: as PVD and VR traction this study failed to verify the presence of significant changes in this respect. Further studies with bigger study populations are needed to elucidate such changes.