Cataracts: The Most Common Affliction Reducing Sight

A cataract is the common one and fortunately, is eminently treatable, and with very little risk. The modern techniques are spectacularly good and provide such good fixes for the ageing eye that function returns to almost as what it was as in youth. The 20th Century saw remarkable advances in cataract treatment – Sir Harold Ridley in the 1940s (knighted for his advance in this field) introduced the concept of an intraocular lens. This stemmed from the identification of the fact that fighter pilots from the 2nd World War, who suffered penetrating eye injuries from the Perspex of the fighter aircraft canopies, had no intra-ocular reaction to the material. This culminated in the first intraocular lens inserted into an eye on 29th November 1949. A momentous day!

The art of cataract surgery has moved through the techniques of removing the whole lens of the eye, still through large incisions with instruments that froze to the lens (driven by the gaseous expansion of freon and carbon dioxide in an instrument called a “cryophake”, facilitating the cataract removal procedure called intra-capsular cataract surgery). This matured into a procedure called extracapsular cataract extraction, in which only the opaque contents of the cataract are removed by expression and suction through smaller incisions.