Toric/Astigmatism

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Toric/Astigmatism Refractive Cataract Surgery

You may have been told by your optometrist that you have astigmatism. This means that the curvature of the front surface of your eye, the cornea, is not evenly round. Some doctors describe this as the eye having a more football shaped curvature. This causes light to misfocus in the back of your eye which creates a blurry image.

When you have both astigmatism and cataracts, there are some decisions you will need to make as to how to proceed. Astigmatism doesn’t cause cataracts, but it will affect how you see after cataract surgery. Cataract surgery will improve your vision simply by the removal of the cloudy cataract that was blocking light from entering your eye, but astigmatism will still cause the light to misfocus once it enters the eye and thereby create blur.

Refractive cataract surgery with the surgeons at Missouri Eye Institute provides an opportunity to decrease the blur caused by astigmatism in a couple of ways. For milder amounts of astigmatism, the excess corneal curvature can be relaxed through incisions either by using the femtosecond laser or by manual limbal relaxing incisions. These incisions will improve how light focuses onto the retina in the back of the eye.

For more moderate and higher amounts of astigmatism, a type of intraocular lens (IOL) called a toric IOL can compensate for the excess curvature of your eye. The toric IOL is placed and rotated in such a way as to cancel out the blur created by astigmatism on your cornea. The toric IOL will provide clearer vision than what you would obtain from a basic IOL. The toric IOL, by itself, will not correct your near or mid-range vision, however, and reading glasses or contact lenses would be needed for near activities.

Thankfully, there are now options to correct astigmatism in multifocal lenses. These multifocal toric IOLs can correct for astigmatism as well as improve your distance and near vision. The doctors at Missouri Eye Institute will review your surgical options at your consultation and help determine which types of implants could work best for you.

Lens Options

Missouri Eye Institute performs cataract surgery at surgical centers in Springfield, Branson, and Joplin, and provides cataract surgeries at hospitals in Springfield, Bolivar, Monett, and Houston to make your care as convenient as possible. We can also coordinate your care after cataract surgery with your local optometrist in order to make the post-operative care convenient for you.