Why Does This Adult female’southward Eyeball Look Like a Sliced Pizza?
(Image credit: The New England Periodical of Medicine ©2022.)
The faint cuts in the woman’due south eyeball look like spokes on a bicycle wheel, or a poorly-sliced pizza — numerous thin lines arranged to course a radial pattern. Just these cuts aren’t due to some kind of new eyeball tattooing. They are the result of a once popular, merely at present outdated, centre surgery the patient had years agone to correct her nearsighted vision, according to a new report of the case.
Doctors spotted the odd-looking incisions during a relatively recent eye exam. The 41-yr-sometime woman had told the eye doctors that her vision had gotten progressively worse over the past two decades, co-ordinate to the report, published yesterday (Jan. 23) in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The exam revealed 16 incisions in a radial pattern on her cornea — the clear, dome-shaped surface that covers the forepart of the eyeball. These incisions are hallmarks of a blazon of eye surgery known every bit a radial keratotomy. Indeed, the patient confirmed she’d had this surgery 23 years before, co-ordinate to the report, led by Dr. Muralidhar Ramappa of LV Prasad Heart Plant in Hyderabad, India. [‘Eye’ Can’t Look: 9 Eyeball Injuries That Will Make You Squirm]
Radial keratotomy was a popular procedure in the 1980s and 1990s for treating nearsightedness (myopia), earlier the evolution of laser heart surgery.
For the procedure, doctors used a blade to brand radial incisions in the cornea, said Dr. Michael Nejat, an ophthalmologist at Staten Island Academy Hospital in New York who was non involved in the case. “You’d make these radial slices, like you would in cut a pizza,” Nejat told Live Science.
The incisions outcome in a flattening of the cornea, Nejat said, and for a person with nearsightedness, this helps them see better without glasses.
In the current image, the fiery-red appearance of the woman’s pupil is merely due to the ruby-eye effect, which occurs when light bounces off the back of the heart. The photo was likely taken this fashion to more clearly bear witness the radial incisions on the cornea, Nejat said.
Just radial keratotomy was tied to a number of complications. “That’s why we don’t do it anymore,” Nejat said.
Overlapping incisions or ones that become too close to the heart of the center may outcome in reduced sharpness of vision, and scars on the cornea could lead to patients seeing glare and halos around objects, the report said.
In addition, although patients may initially see improvements after the surgery, over time, the cornea may go along flattening, which results in overcorrected vision, Nejat said.
Indeed, in the electric current case, the patient’south vision had shifted to get more farsighted.
The patient received a new prescription for corrective lenses, and 6 months later, her vision had not deteriorated farther, the report said.
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Originally published on
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Source: https://www.livescience.com/64581-radial-keratotomy-eye.html