Weather Can Affect Lasik Surgery Outcome

If you're planning to have laser eye surgery, you may want to take note of the weather forecast. Researcher says it can affect the success of your procedure.

Laser eye surgery has lots of people saying goodbye to their glasses and contacts forever. Few had to have the surgery more than once, and a local doctor says weather is to blame.

Dr. Keith Walter, an ophthalmologist at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center says, "In higher humidity conditions the weather's a little more hot and humid, it can affect the laser results. In other words we get more under-correction. So in other words, if somebody comes in and they're near-sighted, and say about a negative four on their prescription, sometimes we wouldn't get all the negative four. We would get all but maybe the last quarter or half of the unit. They would be slightly blurry at distance and have to have something redone to help them with that."

His research found that about 15% of people who had surgery in the summer were under-corrected. Today it's happening only 2 or 3% of the time.

"As it turns out, you can adjust the laser for it. The message that a lot of people got was don't have surgery in the summer, but we have humid times during the winter as well, and you can actually adjust the laser. You can add a little bit more energy to it, or do a little bit more laser time and that will help correct the last little bit of near-sightedness."

Extremely dry weather can affect the results of surgery as well, and Dr. Walter suggests you talk with your doctor before the procedure.

Link

I suspect that this experiments were done with traditional Lasik Surgery and not IntraLase or IntraLasik Surgery.


Filed under Eye Treatment |

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