Journal of Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology
Open Access
ISSN: 2155-9570
ISSN: 2155-9570
Rolando Toyos and Melissa Toyos
Objective: Retrospective safety study of events and best-corrected visual outcomes after simultaneous bilateral cataract surgery (SBCS).
Participants: patients undergoing refractive lens exchange or planned routine cataract surgery at a single site from May 2015 to February 2018.
Methods: The medical records of 280 consecutive SBCS patients were analyzed included patient factors, specifically subsets of diabetics, hypertensive and current or past history of alpha adrenergic blockers.
Main Outcome Measures: average change in BCVA, safety
Results: 560 eyes of 280 patients underwent uncomplicated cataract surgery by two high volume cataract surgeons. The patient population was predominantly with Caucasian with a slight predominance of females. The average age of the patient was 57.6 years with a range of 18-86. 10% of eyes had diabetes although none had proliferative changes before or after surgery. Only 1% of patients were current or previous alpha adrenergic blocker users. 11% of eyes were affected by the use of blood thinners with less than 1% of eyes affected by two or more concurrent blood thinners. Fifty percent of lenses placed were multifocal, 24.6% monofocal, 21.7% toric and the small remainder evenly split between multifocal torics and crystalens. Average axial lengths were 24 mm with ranges of 18-30.5 mm. The predominant co-morbidities included hypertension. Hypercholesterolemia, thyroid disorders, depression or anxiety, allergies, osteoarthritis and gerd. The predominant ocular co-morbidities included open angle glaucoma, dry macular degeneration and dry eye. There were no intraoperative complications and less than 1% of patients experienced postoperative CME. One patient was transferred to emergency room for uncontrolled migraine from the preoperative area although she ultimately successfully underwent SBSC. No cases of endophthalmitis occurred
Conclusions: Bilateral same day surgery can be safe with significant cost and time savings for surgeons, ASCs and patients with no serious adverse events and no increased complication risk, specifically for endophthalmitis.