The belief that cataracts only affect the elderly is wrong. It’s true that they are diagnosed most often (about 50% of people aged 65-74 and about 70% of people over 75 will hear the diagnosis: senile cataract), but this is due to the fact that vision problems associated with aging eyes sooner or later require a visit to an ophthalmologist.
Otherwise, a person becomes dependent. Young people can ignore worrying symptoms for a long time, thinking that cataracts do not affect them – and it attacks at any age! But that’s not all…
Congenital cataracts, adult-onset cataracts, senile cataracts
Cataracts can develop as early as in the fetus and later in children in the first months and years of life. What factors make the fetus susceptible to this condition? Specialists list:
- The effects of certain drugs (such as corticosteroids or sulfonamides),
- Metabolic aberrations (e.g., galactosemia) or chromosomal aberrations (e.g., Down syndrome),
- Intrauterine infections (for example, when a pregnant woman becomes ill with rubella, hepatitis, toxoplasmosis, herpes and even influenza),
- developmental defects of the eyeball (lack of iris, microphthalmia, retinopathy of prematurity and others),
- hereditary conditions.
Senilecataract– the common name for the disease entity known in the medical literature as acquired/degenerativecataract (cataracta acquisita) – usually reveals itself after 50. year of age.
Young adults and people before the age of 50 can also develop cataracts. It appears, for example, as a complication after another eye disease or systemic illness, or as an “add-on” in cases of large visual defects. We also know of cases of drug-induced cataracts (the same mechanism that damages the eyes of a fetus treated with certain pharmaceuticals works here).
Regardless of the age at which we develop cataracts, it will always be a disease involving the successive clouding of the lens of the eye until… – no, we don’t wait for the moment when the lens is already completely cloudy, hard, rigid and becomes the cause of secondary blindness.
Each year, more than 300,000 cataract removal procedures are performed in Poland – both in private surgeries and reimbursed by the National Health Service. These procedures save sight, and as the World Health Organization points out, unoperated cataracts account for nearly 35% of all cases of reversible blindness worldwide.
First symptoms of cataracts
The younger a person is, the easier it is to miss the first symptoms of cataracts. It is even easier to miss it when we have some kind of visual defect and vision problems and difficulties in selecting optimal spectacle lenses (contact lenses) are natural and obvious for us – “we have always had it that way”.
What symptoms should draw our attention?
- Difficulties in properly judging distances,
- Deterioration of vision after dark or in a dark room, but also the frequent impression that we see better on cloudy days,
- Unpleasant glare from intense light sources, such as when driving at night,
- difficulty distinguishing colors
- Seeing objects “as through a dirty glass” or “as through a fog.”
Blaming the aforementioned ailments on fatigue or working too long at the computer is playing with fire!
Cataract diagnosis is simple!
Cataract is not a disease that attacks suddenly and abruptly – it develops over years, in stages: from a slight opacity occurring only at the periphery of the lens, through an advanced, immature cataract, to the form in which the opacity of the lens is already complete – then we lose our sight.
An experienced doctor only needs to see the cloudy lens with dilated pupils and already knows what he is dealing with.
The sooner we hear the diagnosis and undergo cataract surgery, i.e. surgery to remove the cloudy lens, the better! Why? Because the cloudy lens hardens, getting thicker and stiffer, it begins to “expand” in the eye, threatening an increase in intraocular pressure and a glaucoma attack. And, of course, the aforementioned loss of vision.
Cataract surgery is safe
In the 21st century, cataracts, or the cloudy lens of the eye, are surgically removed in two ways:
- Cataract phacoemulsification is a method of removing cataracts using an ultrasonic tip and implanting an artificial intraocular lens.
- Cataract femtoemulsification is surgery with a high-precision femtosecond laser. It’s a method that involves making micro-incisions (called ports) in the cornea and removing the cloudy lens through them and then inserting a new lens.
Both procedures are performed under local (surface) anesthesia. They last several minutes and are as safe as possible. The improvement in the quality of vision occurs quickly – it takes only a few days to return to full vision.
When opting for the procedure at a private facility, the patient is offered a PREMIUM lens. Under insurance, we can get only a monofocal lens (also known as an “amplification lens”), which ensures that we can see clearly at only one distance, or a toric lens, which allows us to remove cataracts and correct astigmatism at the same time (only toric monofocal lenses are reimbursed, and only people with cataracts and astigmatism equal to or exceeding two diopters can get them).
