2 Types of Eye Surgery to Help Repair & Restore Your Vision

As you age, you may have to deal with eye diseases and problems that can cause vision loss. This is especially true if you have health conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, sickle cell anemia, you are severely nearsighted, or have a family history of eye diseases. Here are two types of surgeries to help repair and treat glaucoma and eye floaters.

Glaucoma Surgery

In most situations, glaucoma occurs in your eye as pressure builds up inside the eye fluid until it damages your optic nerve. If you don't get treatment to relieve the pressure, it will cause you to lose your eyesight within a few years. You will first begin to lose vision in your peripheral vision as dark spots begin to appear. 

Recent research in 2010 has found the damage to the optic nerve first starts when your eye vision connectivity is lost to your brain. Then, the disease affects your optic nerve and later your retina. This discovery about how glaucoma damage progresses can help patients with early detection of glaucoma and better treatments for their eye disease. Seeing your eye doctor every year for a glaucoma test can also help improve your chances for an early diagnosis and treatment.

If you do have glaucoma that has begun to affect your vision, your doctor will likely first try prescription medicine to treat it with eye drops. Then, if these treatments do not help the glaucoma and the pain that comes with it, glaucoma surgery is your next option. Your doctor will perform surgery on your eye to either increase the drainage of fluid from your eye or prevent closure of your eye's drainage angle.

During surgery to increase the drainage of your eye's aqueous fluid, your doctor can use a laser to surgically change the opening of your non-working drainage angle. In a second type of surgery, a stent is surgically placed within your non-working drainage angle, between your iris and peripheral cornea. This stent helps to release the fluid pressure of your eye and prevent further eye damage. The stent tube is so small that you won't feel it inside your eye but will help you have normal eye pressure. Your doctor can also make an incision in your eye during surgery, removing a piece of your eye tissue to keep your eye fluid draining.

Floater Removal Surgery

Approximately one-fourth of people over the age of 60 have vitreous fluid shrinkage in their eye and floaters in their field of vision. But if you suffer from nearsightedness, have had eye trauma, cataract surgery, or have diabetes, you are at an increased risk of having floaters. You may already have eye floaters, which look like cobweb-like strings that pass over your vision field.

Floaters in your eye are actually the shadows cast onto your retina from clusters of cells or strands of protein floating around in your eye's vitreous fluid. Most people who have floaters do not have any problems with them, but if you have large or many floaters, they can impair your vision. Moving your eye back and forth or up and down will help to move the floaters temporarily from your vision field.

Vitrectomy surgery removes floaters by sucking out the vitreous fluid in your eye containing the floaters. The fluid is replaced with saline to keep your eye's pressure intact. Unfortunately, there is a high rate of complications from vitrectomy. 

Approximately 50 percent of vitrectomy surgery patients over the age of 50 will get a cataract within five years. If you have a vitrectomy under the age of 50, your risk for cataracts decreases but is still present. You are also at risk of having your retina tearing and detaching, which can cause you to lose part or all your vision. Then, there is a risk for your vitrectomy incision to become infected and leak your eye's fluids. For these reasons, vitrectomy is only recommended in serious cases where the patient has already had cataracts removed and had a retinal tear or detachment.

A safer surgery option to remove floaters uses a laser to remove them individually inside your eye. This procedure removes each floater completely without having to make an incision in your eye. Then, your eye's natural vitreous fluid remains, preventing the formation of cataracts and your retina from detaching.

These two types of eye surgery can help restore or repair your vision. Visit resources like http://www.checdocs.org to learn more.