Cataract: Causes, Symptoms and Treatment

Cataract

Eyes are no doubt one of the most attractive organs of anyone’s personality but if proper care is not provided to them then this beauty can get badly affected.

Here I am going to discuss a very common disease of the eyes and that is famously known as Cataract. First I would like to give you the proper definition of this disease in medical terms ‘it is the clouding that develops in the crystalline lens of eye and it also affects the eye sight’.

Normally you might have seen some person with a blurry type of eye lens just like fog on the glass of window, in the normal routine we can have many names for this problem but the proper medical name is ‘Cataract’. Normally the eye lens tends to be so clear that we can clearly see the inner texture but for a person with this disease, you can see the inner side of eye so clearly.

Types of Cataract

The cataract is classified into following main types.

1. Congenital Cataract

This could be called as the genetically inherited disease, many times the babies are born with this disease or they get this one in the first year of life.

2. Traumatic Cataract

As the name suggests, this is the type of cataract which can develop as a result of some eye injury. It’s not necessary that the condition occur right after the injury, in majority of cases this problem arises after some years.

3. Radiation Cataract

You might have guessed it from the name, this type occurs after an exposure to certain types of radiations.

Cataract Causes

The causes of cataract could be so many but the main ones are the deficiency of protein and water in the body.

• The major part of our eye lens is composed of water and protein and there are some specific classes of protein that are responsible for the clarity of the lens. Over year the structures of these proteins get a bit changed and this change causes the dimness in the eyes.

• Many times the faulty style of living or errors in the habits of eating causes poisoning in the blood stream and this comes out as the major causes of cataract.  This is also called the cataract due to toxic matters in the blood.

• Another major cause of contract is the stress and strain of life; you must get this feeling away from your life because there is no big enemy of you then stress.

• The alcoholic drinks also have a very bad impact on our eyes and there are many cases of cataract are found that have been caused because of the extra consumption of alcoholic drinks.

Cataract Symptoms

The symptoms of cataract are not very hard to determine because this problem starts by affecting the outer look of the eye lens. Some of the very common symptoms of cataract are

• Cloudy or blurry vision

• The faded appearance of the inner texture of the eye lens.

• When the problem started getting intense then the person faces difficulty in recognizing different colors especially the blue and green colors.

• The night vision of the person with this disease also becomes faded.

• Another very common disease is the double images or seeing multiple images in the eye.

• The most common symptom of this disease is that the vision becomes cloudy and this could be commonly reported as if the person is seeing from a foggy window.

Cataract Treatment

The treatment of cataract mostly comes in the form of eye surgery in which the eye lens is removed and then replaced with an artificial one. The cataract is that disease which is operated only at the severe stages and in the early stages the doctor’s suggest the usage of glasses.

The doctors suggest that the cataract should always be operated when the patient feels vision loss during their routine activities like driving, reading or watching TV. There are some cases in which the cataract has to be removed even if it is not implementing any direct impact on the vision and these are the cases in which the some other eye problems get associated with this problem of lens.

Mostly the cataract surgery is classified into three main categories and let me discuss all three a bit briefly.

• Extracapsular surgery: in this surgery the lens is removed and the back half of the capsule behind the lens remains in the eyes.

• Intracapsular surgery is the surgery in which the surgeon removes the entire lens along with the capsule. This is a very rare treatment because in majority of cases the lens is replaced not removed entirely.

Another treatment which is nowadays becoming popular for this problem is the Premium IOL and in this treatment the premium intraocular lens like ReSTOR, ReZoom, and crystal lens are used. These lenses actually provide a clear vision to the patient but a bad thing about this treatment is that the lenses are quite expensive.