Cataract and Discomfort Glare

It is a beautiful day today, the week has been great so far I am doing quite well at work and I believe you are also doing amazing. The rains have started here in Ghana which tells us that we are nearing the wet seasons, I am very well looking forward to it because those are amazing times with good weather.

I hope you are doing well though and that life as a whole is treating you great, I know it is been a while, the past few days have been busy with work as well as hive offline activities including free eye screenings and the projects been done in Ghana with the aid of the HDF. Whichever the case may be I am back and we get to continue with our studies, I hope you are ready?

A cataract is a leading cause of preventable blindness in west Africa, Africa, and the world as a whole, the condition comes with a lot of discomfort, reduced vision, and reduced contrast sensitivity and can affect one's life making him or her handicapped in terms of their social life or day to day activities.

But Cataracts are not supposed to be so because it is one of the conditions of the eye that has a lasting solution to it and it works, and it works very well and can fully restore vision when there ain't underlying conditions to it. Cataract surgeries have been developed over the years and are now very simple to do and can take from a few minutes to a maximum about an hour or so.

The procedure is not so expensive (relatively), for instance in my facility individuals with national health insurance only have to pay about 800 cedis for the procedure to be done for them, thus an equivalent of about 66HBD. Well, whiles it may be a little above the average Ghanaian to just be able to pay this at a go there is also a different perspective here.

Almost every month you will hear of an eyecare facility offering free surgical intervention for individuals with cataracts who could not afford to get the procedure done because they couldn't afford it, you only need to keep your eyes and ears down and you will definitely find one. This means that cataracts shouldn't be the cause of your blindness.

Now there is something about cataract patients that tends to be ignored a lot, reducing their quality of life without realizing it. A lot of times eyecare practitioners focus on visual acuity to neglect of contrast sensitivity. Now the difference between this is that while visual acuity measures how well you can discern an object differently in front of you, the contrast looks at the quality of the discerning with regards to the illumination and the background.

Over the years, I noticed that a lot of cataract patients who come to my facility with good visual acuity, sometimes as good as 6/9 still complained that their vision is bad, they cannot see their friends well when they are walking around, all they see is some sort of fog or smoke hovering over their vision and when I did some research on did I came to understand that cataract patients tend to experience what we call discomfort glare and it is always present and can make vision bad and discomfort at all times.

What happens with comfort glare? Before I talk about discomfort glare let me explain disability glare, now you may or may not have experienced this before but those nights when you were driving and you met incoming traffic with a strong headlight that didn't allow you to see anything on the road except the fact that light was in your eyes? Thus disability glare, is basically what we all know to be glare but there is discomfort glare.

And with this one is it not a passing thing like what we just discussed but is it always present mainly due to pathology or condition of the eye. And so with regards to cataracts, the opacity of the lens media scatters the light whenever it goes through to the retina for vision to be processed, this scattering and the haziness of the media creates some form of foggy appearance with the images.

This makes them not to be as clear and shape as they ought to and so even if the person can see the object the sharpness in discerning it easily from the background as well as the illumination is drastically reduced, this gets worse as the cataract grows or matures. And so if you have cataracts or a friend of yours has cataracts and keeps complaining about their vision then know that this is what is happening to them and with the aid of what you may have learned today with me, do well to convince him or her to get the surgery done.

Cataract surgery is nothing to be scared of, I know this because I have witness the procedure so many times and have convinced a thousand patients to allow us to do the surgery for them and 9/10 always get their vision restored to a very good point and even the 1/10 with bad prognosis tend to have had underlying conditions like retinopathies, glaucoma, etc which couldn't be visualized due to the opacity of the media.

Do not wait for it to be too late because the more the cataract matures the worse the vision gets and when it gets to a point the lens would liquefy into the eye which could make the procedure quite complicated in a way, this doesn't have to be if you have noticed that your vision seem to be more hazy now and you are in the range of geriatrics then you should get yourself checked out for cataract.

Note that cataracts do not only happen with geriatrics though but can happen to anyone, including a child born today, which is why we always advised getting yourself checked out regularly, early detection is key in eyecare and you would be glad you did. Thanks for your attention today and for visiting my blog, it is pleasure.