Cataracts - Symptoms and Treatment - Assil Eye Institute Los Angeles

Dr. Kerry Assil: A cataract is when the lens inside the eye loses its transparency, so it's like a dirty windshield. If we think of the eye like a camera, there's an outer lens called the cornea, that's where we do Lasik. And then the internal zoom lens. When this zoom lens starts to stiffen in our 40s, we start to need reading glasses. And then subsequently it starts to lose its transparency altogether and starts to block the light.

And so people with cataracts tend to know it. Early symptoms are they need a lot more light to read with, the headlights of cars are causing them glare, things are just don't seem as good, they can't see road signs at night as well, sunlight bothers them more. And so these are some of the early symptoms of cataracts and when you have a cataract you know it because it's like being the driver with a dirty windshield. Therefore, not everybody goes to the car wash at the same time. Some people, when there's a first speck of dust will rush off to the car wash. Others wait for a long time before they have anything done. Cataracts are that way.

Patients come to me being told that they have cataracts and what, you know, how soon do they have to have it remedied. I tell them it's not cancer, it's just a opacity. And so they, that helps them to understand better. The cataract surgeries that we do are the most advanced. No center does them any better. Why? Because we were involved in every step of the process. Even my predecessor, Dr. Robert Sinskey, was one of the people who pioneered and popularized modern cataract surgery starting in the 1970s. We offer and have led the field in research with the most innovative lenses for cataract surgery, the replacement lenses, referred to as intraocular lenses, the lenses that enable people to read and see far away without glass for example. We pioneered and led the way in the evaluation of lasers for cataract surgery.

All the way back, my own involvement with that arena went all the way back to the late 1980s and early 1990s and those lasers are now finally available in the marketplace, and we were the first center in the United States, for example, to bring on the most advanced version of those lasers. We were the first center in the world to image the eye during cataract surgery to make sure that the lenses that were going to go into the eye would be proper choice lenses. And so in the field of cataract surgery we've kind of led at every step of the way and we take great pride in getting our patients the ability to not only see more clearly after cataract surgery, but to see more clearly without any glasses.