Cataract
By Bjarne Lühr Hansen PhD, MD and Philipp Skafte-Holm MD, Mentor Institute
With age, the lens of the eye become unclear and you develop cataract. The vision is experienced as blurry and you are blinded by light sources like candles, street light and headlights of a car.
At cataract surgery, the biological lens of the eye is removed and replaced by an artificial silicon lens. Cataract is a common illness with older people in the age of 65 to 70 years. Ordinarily, both eyes are struck, albeit, not always equally severely.
In most cases, cataract is an age change but it can also arise as a consequence of inflammation of the iris, injuries to the eye from violence, diabetes and smoking. Furthermore, medical treatment of chronic diseases can lead to faster development of cataract.
The most important symptoms are impaired eyesight and sometimes disruptions of eyesight (e.g. double vision on one eye).
Often, you have trouble seeing the text on TV and reading small writing together with a tendency to get blinded when driving the car at night. After surgery, where the blurry lens is removed and replaced with an artificial lens, you regain your faculty of vision. The surgery is performed with local anaesthesia. Usually, you do not perform surgery on cataract until you cannot improve the eyesight further with glasses.