Congenital Cataracts in Children :: Blindness Vision Sight Essays

Congenital Cataracts in Children Cataracts are the primary cause of sightlessness worldwide. Cataracts are the clouding of the lense. The lens is transparent and is important for the thinking of a sharp image on the retina. There are several divers(prenominal) types of cataracts. Congenital cataracts are present at birth, and will be the focus of this paper. An middle disease causes secondary cataracts. Traumatic cataracts are caused by an injury. Finally, remote cataracts are caused by old age and are the most putting green form of cataracts. Cataracts can be unilateral, meaning in one eye or bilateral, in both eyes. Congenital cataracts may be partial(p) affecting part of the lens, or complete affecting the whole lens. If they are partial and not dense enough to interfere with light transmission, essential cataracts are quite common and often visually insignificant (Vaughan, 1989). dumb central congenital cataracts require surgery. They cause a significant sledding visua lly and must be detected early. A parent commonly can not detect these cataracts. The doctor usually detects the cataracts in the new-sprung(a) nursery immediately after birth. Unilateral infantile cataracts that are central, dense, and large than 2mm in diameter will cause permanent damage if not treated within the first 2 months of life (Vaughan, 1989). On the otherwise hand, symmetric bilateral cataracts demand less urgent treatment (Vaughan, 1989).The primary(prenominal) treatment is surgery, followed by lens reserve / correction, and usually completed with catch therapy. The surgery is called phacoemulsification. In this procedure, ultrasound vibrations of up to 40,000 cycles per second are make by a hollow tube-like instrument. It is inserted and the vibrations break up the lens into atomic pieces. The pieces are then sucked out through the tube (Golstein, 1999). The lens replacement/correction may be done one of ii 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 change the images to the retina. I raise that an intraocular lens might be a purify choice compared to glasses or contact lens because the latter 2 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 like using a repair to cover the bad eye(s). Usually, 6 to 8 hours per day were prescribed.