About Refractive Lens Exchange
What is Refractive Lens Exchange?
Refractive Lens Exchange is the process of removing the ageing lens inside your eye and replacing it with a new ageless acrylic lens.
Refractive Lens Exchange is also known as Prelex, an acronym for presbyopic lens exchange, where presbyopia is the inevitable condition in which the lens in your eye becomes increasingly inflexible as you age.
How do I know if I am a candidate for Refractive Lens Exchange?
If you are in your prime and would happily ditch your glasses and contacts, Refractive Lens Exchange can be the key to “future proofing” your vision.
Refractive Lens Exchange is probably the best procedure for you now if:
- You are over 45 years old.
- You began to lose your reading vision in your early 40s, and it has progressed to 'impossible to read most books without reading glasses'.
- You don’t want to wait until you get cataracts to have your lenses replaced because you want to future proof your vision – safely, permanently and for life!
What happens during my Refractive Lens Exchange procedure?
The procedure involves these five steps:
- The eye is completely numbed using eye drops.
- The surgeon makes a micro incision on the edge of your cornea. This small circular opening is typically less than 2mm and allows access to the cornea.
- A very small (less than 1/8" or 2mm) ultrasound probe is used to remove the lens inside the eye. All modern lens surgery (including laser cataract surgery) uses this same ultrasound probe to remove the non-functioning lens.
- A custom-made, artificial, clear lens is implanted in the capsule that previously held the old lens.
- The micro-incisions are hydrated to seal without any sutures.
How long does it take?
The RLE procedure takes one of our highly experienced surgeons around 15 minutes, is done under local anaesthetic and is completely painless.
At our clinic in Prague we offer a straightforward Future Proof Premium package that includes a comprehensive pre-operative examination of both eyes, followed by RLE procedures on both eyes and a final post-operative examination, all spread sensibly over several days.
So you’ll have plenty of time to enjoy this stunning capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
What are the risks?
In lens replacement surgery, as in everything in life, we must look at the risks versus benefits to make our best decision. Data from Medicare and the Centers for Disease Control in the US shows 99.5% of patients have no severe postoperative complications from cataract surgery. Most of the remaining 0.5% end up just fine after treatment.
Refractive Lens Exchange is an identical surgical process to cataract surgery: the lens is simply not cloudy enough to call it a cataract.
Everyone gets a bit nervous undergoing any procedure, and it’s perfectly normal in human nature to measure against the worst case scenario we can create in our minds. In this case, the odds of any complications are extremely low, and the risk of doing nothing is far more complicated in the long run.
To put all this into perspective, there are over 400,000 Refractive Lens Exchange/cataract procedures successfully carried out in the UK every year!
If you have any questions we will be happy to answer them. Simply give us a call 07508 362 450 or click here to email us and we'll call you back.
