Implanting Permanent Contacts

[NYer]

Hi All,
I'm not a LASIK victim, but so many people on this site are that this story caught my eye. It was on one of our local TV news channels in New York yesterday and on their web site. Here is the article:
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Implanting Permanent Contacts
Thursday, June 19, 2008 | 7:54 PM

By Dr. Jay Adlersberg

NEW YORK (WABC) -- For millions of Americans suffering from nearsightedness, LASIK eye surgery seems like the answer they've been waiting for; but not all patients are good candidates for the procedure. For some of these patients, a new surgery is helping them see the light.

Seven's On Call with Dr. Jay Adlersberg.

Special education teacher Angela Naughton spends her summers in far-off lands, tutoring students around the globe. As someone with extremely poor vision, Naughton's nightmare was being stranded with no contacts or glasses.

"If anything went wrong there I couldn't get another pair of glasses because mail took too long to get there," Naughton told Ivanhoe. She looked at LASIK surgery but was consistently turned away by doctors who said Naughton was a poor candidate for the procedure.
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"We found that her corneas were too thin, which is common nowadays for a lot of people," Steve H. Chang, M.D., an ophthalmologist at Pacific Vision Institute in San Francisco, Calif., told Ivanhoe. "In other words, there was not enough tissue to safely do the LASIK procedure."

Dr. Chang recommended implantable contact lenses; a procedure that implants a Collamer lens behind the patient's iris and restores 20/20 vision.

"We make a few very, very small incisions -- less than three millimeters -- where the white of the eye meets the colored part of the eye," Dr. Chang explained. "We inject a substance in there to keep the space in the eye and then gently inject the lens in, which unfolds inside the eye."

The surgery doesn't alter the cornea as LASIK does. Implantable contact lenses are most effective in patients over age 21 and, because collagen is formed naturally by the body, there's little risk of rejection.

The best part & if Naughton's prescription changes, the lens can be replaced, allowing her to stay focused on planning her exotic getaways. Most implantable contact lens patients recover quickly and resume regular activities the next day.

[acarol]

Sounds good but i guess there is side effects too.

[Stanza]

I saw on a website of a company that they would never do laser surgery as they think implantable contacts are the way forward, they're even developing ones you can change the prescription of when they are in the eye! (some way off still).

they do have side effects, they can break down the iris.

[acarol]

Be something to keep an eye out for i guess.

[Rebecca Petris]

Don't hold your breath.

By the way, this is not new technology. The only reason for the news article is some local clinic trying to get press to promote themselves. Intraocular lenses have been FDA approved and the procedures have been performed commercially for several years. There are a couple of types - phakic lenses which are implanted in front of the natural lens, and lens exchange where the natural lens is removed (as is done during cataract surgery) and a lens implanted in its place. This has never yet taken off in the mainstream due to complications, limitations and how invasive it is. I do not believe it will ever become truly popular and commoditized to the extent laser surgeries have.