PREOPERATIVE EVALUATION OF REFRACTIVE SURGERY

Abstract

Refractive surgery has made the transition from the fringes to the centre ground in contemporary ophthalmology, and is gaining increasing traction in the population as an alternative to contact lens wear or spectacle correction. Key steps in pre-operative assessment are: procedure selection, risk evaluation, and preoperative counselling. An Understanding of each of these elements is becoming integral to modern optometric practice. Refractive surgery is a category of treatments designed to induce structural change to the eye with the intent of altering its refractive status, There are two broad categories of refractive surgery, Keratorefractive, during which the physical architecture of the cornea is altered; and Intraocular, during which synthetic lenses are placed into the eye, with or without removal of the natural crystalline lens. Although many ophthalmologists viewed the field of refractive surgery with skepticism only a few decades ago, it has since achieved wide acceptance. As refractive surgery has evolved from controversial to routine, the spectrum of indications has grown, and an increasing proportion of patients who seek refractive surgery have other known ocular or systemic diseases Evaluation of patients considering each refractive surgery is often preceded by a brief screening examination; the purpose of screening is to eliminate patients who are clearly not candidates for this type of surgery.