Treating Astigmatism, The Right Way

Astigmatism is actually a refractive error problem where the light will not get focussed on a single point inside your eyes and farsighted and nearsighted persons normally report astigmatism.

For a better vision or a correct vision, your cornea should have a dome-shape, otherwise the vision will not get focussed and becomes indistinct at all points.

When your corneal curvature is steep at one particular point then there may not be one axis but two axes that are perpendicular to each other making your vision blurred.

A refractive error of 0.5 diopter or more of astigmatism is considered to be above normal and will result in an uncomfortable blurred vision.

When it comes to surgical correction for astigmatism, then laser-assisted surgery can be used for correcting the corneal curvature and thereby the central cornea can be shaped up to a more desired shape and thus getting a corrected vision.

Normally the central cornea up to 6 or 7 millimeters will be corrected to attain a desired condition or shape similar to a bowl.

Astigmatism correction through surgery is difficult than correcting farsightedness or nearsightedness. During the astigmatism correcting surgery, the surgeon will try to alter the curvature of the cornea by selectively removing the corneal tissues.

For instance, in case of myopic astigmatism, removing corneal tissues present in the steep area will flatten your steepest corneal curvature meridians out and this will make the entering light source to get focussed on the retina.

Many surgeons who operate for correcting astigmatism will use a special "masked" broad-beam based laser equipment that is being controlled by the user customized computer software.

During the pre-surgery procedure, your cornea will be digitized meaning that your cornea will be represented by way of numbers (numerical form) and now the computer will know and understand the curvature of your cornea based on the numerical values.

Now the computer controlled laser will burn or chip off the corneal tissues that are elevated from the rest of the tissues to make the surface evenly flatter.

The procedure is so sophisticated, that the “flying-spot” laser will only act on tissues which are located on a higher plane and avoid any of the lower lying or flatter tissues.

Astigmatism may result from irregularities on your eyes and from many other reasons. There may be a chance that your back portion of cornea is malformed that can result in astigmatism.

Further, your eyes being a two-lens structure, any incompatibility between these two lenses, say the curvature of the first lens different from the underlying second lens, can also cause astigmatism.

There is a yet another possibility of your internal eye components getting dislocated that may cause blurred vision or astigmatism.

On your internal retina, a tiny spot with dense receptors is located and this spot is known as fovea. In true sense this fovea is the real seat for a clear vision and you may start experiencing blurred vision.

If the incoming light axis doesn’t fall correctly on this fovea area. When such is the condition, then surgical procedure cannot correct this problem.

As of today, surgeons can surgically correct your astigmatism problem caused only due to the irregular front side curvature of your cornea.

The surgical procedure is efficient only in case of treatable surface corneal astigmatism and if the disparity is more when compared with the total astigmatism then the surgical procedure cannot give you a reliable result.

In the computer controlled laser surgery, there is a possibility to programme so as to make the cornea to a desired shape.

This type of surgical correction is possible only when astigmatism is caused by the curvature problem of cornea on the outer front side and the same cannot be applied on patients who have astigmatism due to some internal eye conditions.

Patients, who have astigmatism due to certain internal problems, will continue to have residual astigmatism even after surgical correction of their front corneal tissues.

In fact, many patients will have compensated astigmatism meaning that their external corneal curvature caused astigmatism will get nullified by their internal eye problem and when such patients are operated upon using laser procedures.

They will continue to report astigmatism even after surgeryand the situation before surgery would have become more better for them.

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