Whether Your Vision Will Slip Back to its Original Level even after LASIK Surgery?

Majority of the patients who have undergone LASIK procedure have never reported any regression in their eyesight.

Though an initial period of around three months are required to get a stable vision, the desired corneal curvature achieved through surgery will continue to remain same for the rest of your life.

Many of the undertaken post-operative follow-up tests using computerized topography revealed that a majority of patients who have undergone LASIK procedure achieved a reasonably desired refraction levels within the first three months of surgery and they also continued to retain or maintain the same levels of vision thereafter.

However, the case will be slightly different in case of high myopic patients and they may tend to take a little longer time, say even six months to get a stabilized vision.

Only in few high myopic cases, the patients have reported a drop or decrease in the effects of LASIK surgery over a period of time.

But the doctors are yet to identify the cause behind such regression in myopic patients, but many doctors opine that the depth of the laser ablation and the healing process might hold answers for this problem of regression specific to high myopic patients.

Whenever more of tissues are removed, the stroma or middle layer of the cornea will take more time to attain the desired curvature and it may even take one year or so.

Further, the growing epithelial cells might get little more thicker in areas where laser beams have had its dig, especially in high myopic patients.

In case of severe nearsightedness, the situation will warrant for removing more of tissues than that of milder cases and hence there will be more and deeper laser ablations.

In such cases the body’s natural mechanism will be concentrated in making the loss of epithelium good and the natural healing process may contribute to the post-surgical regression in highly myopic patients.

LASIK can never hasten or slow down the normal progression of nearsightedness. But, unfortunately, few of myopic patients might continue to suffer from a little nearsightedness for the rest of their life.

Even though, the corneal curvature is retained or maintained, due to the reason of crystalline lens developing cataract or the eyeball getting elongated slightly, the patients will become more myopic even after cataract surgery.

However, whatever may be the regression level or the progress of nearsightedness, the myopic patients can still be able to have a quality vision without wearing glasses after surgery.

To make the point more clear we will take a hypothetical case of a 30 year old person with -7 diopters of myopia. The person in his next five years, whether he is opting for surgery or not, will develop an extra diopter of refractive error and he will be with a severe -8 diopters refractive error problem, which is considered as severe myopia.

Under the favourable condition of this person getting LASIK surgical correction, he may end up with a -1 diopter, which is considered as mild myopia.

After the pass of next 5 years, the same person, due to the elongation problem of his eyeball, might -2 diopters refractive error.

At this stage he may either opt to sit for a second surgery or manage the situation with glasses. And in any case, a –3 diopters refractive error can be considered favourable in the place of a –8 diopters refractive error.

A yet another study reveals that people who are habitual to working indoors are more prone to developing myopic conditions than those people who go outdoors for their regular work.

For example, construction workers who have to keep their focus on long distant objects may not be susceptible to developing myopic condition.

This was due to the reason that at the time of looking at nearer objects your eyes have to converge to get a proper focus and over a period of time, there will be elongation of your eye ball thus resulting in myopia.

A rough estimate is that for every millimeter increase in the length of your eyeball, your myopia will increase with a –3 diopters refractive error value.

To make the example clearer, imagine squeezing a tennis ball and if you squeeze it and let it free, the ball will regain its shape immediately.

Now imagine a situation where you squeeze the ball continuously, say for 8 hours in a day and you do it for ten years continuously, then the ball would have got elongated and you can even visually identify the change.

So such will be the effect of converging acts of your eyes and in a long run it will lead to elongation of your eye ball that in turn resulting in myopia.

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