If you are at risk for developing cataracts later in life or know someone who is beginning to develop them, then you may dread the time when you are the person you love has to go under the knife to have them removed. Although traditional cataract surgery is very safe, many people simply fear it because the thought of having their eye cut with a scalpel just sounds scary. There is now a cataract-removal surgery that allows doctors to skip the scalpel, and another treatment still in development will one day make removing cataracts completely non-surgical.
Laser Cataract Removal
With laser cataract removal, the surgeon first uses a special machine to capture a 3D image of the eye. Then, incision sites are planned ahead of time. During surgery, the planned incisions are made with a super-precise, thin laser beam. Then, the same laser is used to break
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Cataract-Removing Eye Drops
While not on the market yet, researchers are trying to create eye drops that can restore eye lenses plagued with cataracts back to a healthy condition. Cataracts develop in the lenses of eyes when the balance of natural proteins that make them up are disrupted. Researchers now suspect this disruption involves a deficiency of a specific molecule in the eye lens called lanosterol. Their theory is that replacing this molecule in the eye can restore it to a healthy state, and so far, they are right.
Eye drops containing this molecule have been tested in animals with cataracts, and the drops have amazingly cleared up the cloudy, cataract-afflicted eye lenses of the animals. While the drops have yet to be tested on humans, they are expected to work on people, too, although side effects are yet