Do Cornea Scars Affect Lasik?

Cornea scars are best avoided. But sometimes easier said than done. While many things can cause scarring in the cornea, scars don’t necessarily have to prevent you from getting your vision corrected.

When we plan lasik treatments, we want to ensure that there is a healthy volume of cornea tissue following the treatment. Lasik done with all lasers has allowed us to create thinner lasik flaps. Thinner lasik flaps allow us preserve more cornea volume. This is all great! Until we run into scars…

Normally the layers or the cornea are nice and parallel. When scars form, the collagen framework regrows much more disorganized. Light can’t pass through this disorganization, which is how bad scars affect vision. This disorganization also makes the cornea weaker in that spot. This weak spot can become problematic for lasik flaps. The air bubbles that form when the laser is creating a lasik flap can actually break though these scars. This is called a vertical gas breakthrough. During surgery, we don’t really like this to happen, and so therefore we try to avoid it. For small and mild scars, we simply make the flap thicker. This keeps the air bubbles away from surface scars. Therefore, small scars don’t affect the ability to get lasik done. If the scar gets too big or there are too many, then PRK becomes the better option. Because there is no flap in PRK, scars don’t cause the same issues.

Even though the better strategy is to avoid scars altogether, scars don’t have to prevent you from getting your vision corrected!

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