RADIAL KERATOTOMY - 5 YEARS POSTOPERATIVE OPTICAL AND VISUAL RESULTS

The authors report a retrospective study of R. K. surgery performed on 72 eyes for simple myopia by one surgeon, five years after surgery. F ifty-four cases were observed regularly at 1 year and 5 years post-ope ratively, which allowed an analysis of refractive and visual parameter s, for myopias between - 1.5 and 6 D before surgery. Five years after : 92.9% of eyes were within +/- 1 D of emmetropia ; 5.7% of eyes were undercorrected by more than 1 D ; 1.4% of eyes were overcorrected by m ore than 1 D and 88.7% of the cases had uncorrected visual acuity of 2 0140 or more. In general, our refractive and keratometric results were stable between the first and fifth year post-operatively. We report o nly one case of real undercorrection, and one case of progressive hype ropia with loss of best spectacle corrected visual acuity. In this stu dy, we observed a statistically significant decrease of 1/100 in the m ean uncorrected visual acuity, which is explained by remyopisations. A ll but one of them were less than 1 D. The review of long term results of R.K. is difficult because of the many different methodologies and protocols. However all of them show a unpredictable continuous increas e in the effect of surgery in the hyperopia direction. Prolonged wound healing seems to be the most probable reason for this progressive hyp eropia.