Publication
Aims/Purpose: Cataract, i.e., an opacification of the natural intraocular lens, is one of the leading causes of visual impairments worldwide. Cataract surgery, which involves the removal of the opaque lens and implantation of an artificial intraocular lens, is one of the most cost‐efficient interventions in all of health care to improve visual impairments. However, it remains unclear how exactly visual performance changes after surgery, which we aim to investigate in our study.
Methods: We tested 30 older adults undergoing cataract surgery longitudinally with a battery of visual tests. Participants were tested a total of four times: before surgery, after surgery on one eye, after surgery on the second eye, and a few weeks after surgery when vision was fully stabilized. The battery tested various visual abilities and included the following tests: visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, coherent motion, orientation discrimination, reaction time, and visual search. All tests were performed binocularly, and a subset of tests was repeated monocularly.
Results: Results suggest that visual acuity and orientation discrimination performance increase after each surgery. Performance in contrast sensitivity and coherent motion significantly increases after the surgery on the first eye but not between the second and third tests. Thus, monocular surgery is sufficient to improve performance in these tests. On the other side, visual search and reaction time performance do not seem to benefit from cataract surgery. For all tests, the level of performance after surgery is maintained in the last testing.
Conclusions: Our study shows that cataract surgery leads to improved perceptual functions in most, but not all, tests. Future analysis will determine whether the level of performance change depends on baseline performance, and whether predictions about surgery success can be made based on performance in the tests.