Determinants of long-term subjective quality of vision after small incision lenticule extraction

Session Details

Session Title: Refractive
Session Date/Time: Friday 15/02/2019 | 08:30-10:00
Paper Time: 09:16
Venue: Room MC3

First Author: V.Schmelter GERMANY
Co Author(s):                  

Abstract Details

Purpose:

To elucidate the determinants of patient-reported quality of vision after SMILE.

Setting:

This prospective cross sectional study included patients that had undergone SMILE for myopia or myopic astigmatism at least 3 months previously.

Methods:

For assessment of visual symptoms, the Quality of Vision (QOV) questionnaire was employed, which constitutes a validated, linear-scaled 30-item instrument providing a QOV score on three scales (symptom frequency, severity and bothersomeness). The respective QOV scores were correlated with a plethora of patients’ baseline characteristics (e.g. age, pachymetry, K-readings), treatment parameters (e.g surgical refractive correction, lenticule/cap thickness) as well as post-operative measurements (e.g. corneal higher-order aberrations, visual acuity, refractive error).

Results:

A total of 394 eyes of 197 patients (female/male ratio = 1.5:1) with a mean follow-up of 740±429 days were included. Mean age was 32±8 years and mean surgically-induced refractive correction amounted to -4.75±1.9 diopters of spherical equivalent. No statistically significant sex-related differences in postoperative QOV were detected. Statistically significant differences in objective parameters between the group with the 25% lowest QOV score and the group with the 25% highest QOV score were detected: a higher preoperative visual acuity, a lower preoperative coma score and a higher maximal lenticule thickness (bothersome category) led to a higher QOV.

Conclusions:

This comprehensive analysis of subjective quality of vision after SMILE adds to our understanding of the complex relationship between objective measurements and subjective patient-reported outcomes of corneal refractive surgery. The questionnaire analysis revealed an overall good subjective Quality of Vision score after the SMILE procedure. It was possible to define risk factors, which can help the surgeon to estimate the postoperative patient satisfaction after SMILE procedure.

Financial Disclosure:

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