Abstract
Purpose :
To compare subjective quality of vision between two modalities of refractive surgery, wavefront-guided LASIK and wavefront-guided PRK, in the treatment of myopia up to one year post-surgery in a prospective randomized contralateral eye study.
Methods :
64 eyes of 32 patients underwent refractive surgery, with one eye treated with LASIK and the other with PRK with eyes randomized for dominance. During preoperative visit and on visits scheduled on postoperative months 1, 3, 6, and 12, patients completed a questionnaire assessing their quality of vision and visual symptoms. Results were quantified, and statistical comparisons between the two modalities were made using a Student’s t-test, with a P-value of less than 0.05 representing statistical significance.
Results :
Preoperatively, there were no significant differences in subjective visual quality or symptoms of each eye. One month post-operation, PRK eyes were noted to have significantly worse clarity during the day (P = 0.001) and at night (P = 0.001), worse overall vision (P = 0.024), more fluctuations in vision (P = 0.006), and more double vision or “ghosting” (P = 0.022) than LASIK eyes. On postoperative months 3, 6, and 12, these symptoms were no longer significantly different. In eyes with a higher order aberration measured preoperatively (root-mean-square of 0.3 or greater), which account for 44.1% of operated eyes, PRK eyes demonstrated significant worsening in clarity during both day and night (P = 0.006 and 0.012, respectively) and more fluctuation in vision (P = 0.041) at postoperative month 1 as compared to LASIK eyes. In eyes with a lower order aberration, the only significant difference between the two eyes was a decrease in daytime clarity in PRK eyes versus LASIK eyes (P = 0.036) after 1 month. At 3, 6, and 12 months, there were no significant differences in subjective symptoms between the two eyes.
Conclusions :
Subjective symptoms were overall better in LASIK eyes only at postoperative month 1. Among pairs of eyes with a lower order aberration, there were few differences in these symptoms when contrasting the two modalities.
This is an abstract that was submitted for the 2016 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, Wash., May 1-5, 2016.