Lasik Risks and Complications
Lasik surgery, like any other surgery has certain risks, side effects and complications (both during operation and postoperatively), but are much less in compare to other operative procedures. The quick recover after Lasik eye surgery also reduce the complications to a great extent.
The risks of Lasik surgery depends on many factors like the general condition of patient, the experience and expertise the ophthalmic surgeon has, the facilities available in the hospital, the availability of dedicated nursing and other supportive staffs, the standard of maintenance of equipments etc. If all these are appropriate the risk involved with Lasik eye surgery is minimal.
The complications that may arise due to Lasik eye surgery can be grouped into intraoperative, early post operative, late post operative and other complications.
Intra-Operative Complications of Lasik Eye Surgery
These may be in the form of displacement of flaps which may need repositioning, slipped flap or detachment of corneal flap from the rest of cornea during surgery and presence of interface flap particles in the cornea after Lasik eye surgery. The experience of the ophthalmic surgeon, doing the surgery and use of advanced technologies like “wavefront technology” and IntraLasik can reduce the intra-operative complications of Lasik surgery to a great extent.
Early Postoperative Lasik Complications
The early postoperative complications of Lasik eye surgery are dryness of eye, tearing of eye, diffuse lamellar keratitis (DLK, also known as Sands of Sahara syndrome), infection of the operated site in cornea, sub-conjunctival hemorrhage etc. DLK is due to infiltration of white blood cells in between the corneal flap and the cornea and the treatment is application of steroid eye drops, but sometimes it may require clearing of the white blood cells manually by the surgeon after lifting the corneal flap. The infection generally responds well to antibiotics. The dryness of eye may become persistent which need appropriate management.
Late Postoperative Lasik Complications
The late postoperative complications are traumatic flap dislocation (may occur even up to 7 years postoperatively), epithelial ingrowth, glare, halos around bright light at night, persistence of severe chronic dryness of eye (due to severing of approximately 70% of nerve fibers of cornea) etc. All the late postoperative complications of Lasik are very rare. There is potential for permanent dryness of the eye.
Other Complications of Lasik
It may be difficult to measure the intraocular pressure of the operated eye for diagnosis of glaucoma and for calculating the intraocular lens power after cataract operation. To overcome this complication you should keep record of your preoperative, operative and postoperative eye measurements. Other complications of Lasik includes macular hole, retinal detachment, neovascularization, increase incidence of uveitis and blepharitis etc.