Congenital Cataracts in Children :: Blindness Vision Sight Essays

Congenital Cataracts in Children Cataracts are the primary cause of blindness worldwide. Cataracts are the clouding of the lens. The lens is transparent and is important for the focusing of a sharp image on the retina. There are several different types of cataracts. Congenital cataracts are present at birth, and will be the focus of this paper. An eye disease causes secondary cataracts. Traumatic cataracts are caused by an injury. Finally, senile cataracts are caused by old age and are the most common form of cataracts. Cataracts can be unilateral, meaning in one eye or bilateral, in both eyes. Congenital cataracts may be partial affecting part of the lens, or complete affecting the whole lens. If they are partial and not dense enough to interfere with light transmission, congenital cataracts are quite common and often visually insignificant (Vaughan, 1989). Dense central congenital cataracts require surgery. They cause a significant loss visually and must be detected early. A parent usually can not detect these cataracts. The doctor usually detects the cataracts in the newborn nursery immediately after birth. Unilateral infantile cataracts that are central, dense, and larger than 2mm in diameter will cause permanent damage if not treated within the first 2 months of life (Vaughan, 1989). On the other hand, symmetric bilateral cataracts demand less urgent treatment (Vaughan, 1989). The main treatment is surgery, followed by lens replacement / correction, and usually completed with occlusion therapy. The surgery is called phacoemulsification. In this procedure, ultrasound vibrations of up to 40,000 cycles per second are made by a hollow tube-like instrument. It is inserted and the vibrations break up the lens into little pieces. The pieces are then sucked out through the tube (Golstein, 1999). The lens replacement/correction may be done one of two ways. An intraocular lens is a plastic lens inserted where the real lens used to be. Aphakic contact lens correction is using contact lens to improve the images to the retina. I found that an intraocular lens might be a better choice compared to glasses or contact lens because the latter two tend to enlarge the image. The brain can not combine the two images if one of them is enlarged and the other is of normal size (Goldstein, 1999). Finally, I found that most treatments end with occlusion therapy. This therapy is lik e using a patch to cover the bad eye(s). Usually, 6 to 8 hours per day were prescribed.