Effectiveness and Safety of Limbal Relaxing Incisions for Correcting Post Phacoemulsification High Astigmatism

Astigmatism is one of the commonest refractive errors encountered during our clinical practice. Surgically induced astigmatism is the main obstacle to achieve good uncorrected visual acuity following cataract surgery. It is estimated that corneal astigmatism of more than 1.0 diopter (D) is found in up to 40% of patients presenting for cataract surgery, 1.5D or more is present in over 20% and above 2.0D in 10%.

Astigmatism induces distortion of the image leading to compromise quality of vision. In order to achieve better visual results, the effect of postoperative astigmatism should be minimized, management options for corneal astigmatism include glasses, contact lenses, and surgery such as Limbal relaxing incisions (LRIs), refractive laser surgery, toric lenses or rarely corneal grafting. The LRIs technique involves the placement of incisions corresponding to the steep meridian, resulting in corneal flattening and the reduction of astigmatic power. LRI is a safe and an inexpensive procedure, which is simple for experts to perform. Although most of the nomograms recommended that LRIs technique can correct up to 3 D of astigmatism ,it has been found that it is possible to correct even more than 4 D if the incisions were performed on high degrees of astigmatism.