Byline: MARY BETH REGAN Baltimore Sun
When Cheryl Flood's husband had laser eye surgery to correct poor vision a few years ago, she was more than envious. 'I was downright resentful,' said the 40-year-old mother of two. 'He qualified for the surgery, but I didn't.'
Like many people, Flood wasn't a good candidate for conventional LASIK or other laser procedures because of corneal irregularities.
Still, she persevered in her quest for a glasses-free existence. She called her doctor, Sheri Rowen, every few months for nearly three years. She plunked money into her tax-free health care spending account in the hopes that a new technology would come along.
Eventually it did.
Last month, Flood was one of the first people in the United States to receive newly approved implantable lenses in a surgery by Rowen at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore. The synthetic lens, widely used in Europe for more than a decade, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in September. It will be marketed under the brand name Verisyse by Advanced Medical Optical Inc. of Santa Ana, Calif. A second lens by another company is expected on the market in the spring.
'These implantable lenses are the wave of the future,' Rowen said. 'They have the ability to correct vision with exact precision without altering the shape of the cornea.' And unlike laser procedures, which do alter the shape of the cornea, implantable lenses are permanent, although they can be removed if there are problems.
Flood arrived at Mercy Medical Center on a Wednesday morning with her sister, another LASIK patient whose vision was corrected several years ago. By 1 p.m., Flood had been lightly sedated and prepped for surgery on her left eye. In most eye surgeries, it's standard procedure to operate on only one eye at a time, in case there are complications. Her right eye was scheduled to be done at another time.
Rowen cut the bottom of Flood's cornea and suctioned up some blood. Then she slid surgical instruments beneath the cornea into the inner chamber of the eye.
Next, Rowen used tweezers to lift a synthetic lens from an operating table. The lens looked no different from any contact lens, except that it was slightly smaller. She then lifted the corneal tissue and placed the lens across the iris, over Flood's pupil.
In 10 minutes, the lens was in place. Rowen lifted muscle from the iris to anchor the lens. Then, using tweezers, she sewed the cornea back together with nylon thread thinner than a human hair.
The arrival of implantable lenses marks a departure from recent advances in corrective eye surgery. In the 1990s, doctors pioneered conventional LASIK treatments, which use lasers to reshape the cornea for sharper vision.
In recent years, computer and other technologies have refined the precision of laser surgery. In addition, doctors have begun using surface ablation procedures, such as LASEK and Epi-LASIK, which correct vision by reshaping the cornea without making any incisions in the eye.
But implantable lenses piggyback on an entirely different idea that has been around since the 1940s to correct cataracts, a clouding of the natural crystalline lens that causes blindness. Doctors have long treated cataracts by replacing the eye's natural lens with a synthetic lens.
This approach saves vision, but artificial lenses are not as pliable or responsive as the eye's natural lens.
Two decades ago, researchers in the Netherlands got the idea of placing an implantable lens into the eye to correct vision without removing the natural lens.
Today, researchers are working on these lenses, called phakic lenses, to cure a host of vision problems.
