Why do you see starbursts around lights after cataract surgery?

Well, not everybody does!

Cataract surgery is the replacement of the clouded, natural lens of the eye with an artificial intraocular lens (IOL), or "lens implant." Despite the tremendous advances in ophthalmic technology, there is still no IOL that has been developed that can successfully reproduce the optical quality of the natural and normal human lens. Vision is not as simple as how small the letters you can see on the eye chart. There are many other aspects of visual performance such as contrast sensitivity, dynamic range, higher order aberrations, all of which we take for granted. While the new artificial lens implant can do an excellent job of getting rid of the blur of cataract and even nearsightedness and astigmatism -all at the same time -we are not so far along in coming up with ways to reduce optical side-effects such as glare, halos, and starburst around lights, especially at night.

Patients usually judge the results of cataract surgery (and their new artificial lens implant) by how well they see afterwards compared to what they were seeing before. If glare and starburst were there before, the resulting vision, even with some degree of these, is still judged as a success. If those were not much of an issue beforehand (despite the improvement in visual acuity) then they can easily be judged as negative.

_Written by J. Trevor Woodhams, M.D. - Chief of Surgery, Woodhams Eye Clinic