He first visited us for cataract consultation because his right eye had been hard to see with for three to four years. He had high myopia, about −17.5 D in the right eye and −7.5 D in the left, but with no difference in axial length between the eyes, so the right eye had become myopic through progression of a nuclear cataract. Nuclear hardness was about 4 in the right eye and 3 in the left, and there was no fundus disease, so the reduced vision was mainly due to cataract, and surgery was planned.
He mainly does desk work and also drives at night, and agreed to monofocal lenses set for computer-to-reading distance.
The nuclei were hard, but modern cataract surgery machines are excellent, so we completed the surgery efficiently and without problems, without much ultrasound.
Vision, right 0.02 (0.4) and left 0.04 (1.2) before surgery, improved greatly to right 0.5 (1.5) and left 0.6 (1.5) after surgery, and he was very satisfied to be freed from high myopia and to manage daily life without glasses.
Since the right eye had been more myopic before surgery, we set the target refractions so that the right eye would see at −3.0 D = 30 cm and the left at −2.5 D = 40 cm. Normally, uncorrected vision at this degree of myopia is about 0.1–0.2, but it is a very interesting phenomenon that people who were originally highly myopic, like him, often have much better uncorrected vision after surgery than those who were emmetropic.
2020.09.20