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FRIDAY, April 25 (HealthDay News) -- Golf great Tiger Woods lauds vision-correcting LASIK surgery as "life changing." NASA now allows astronauts to undergo the procedure, and the U.S. military says it has been performed on 112,500 military personnel, including pilots.
But are some of the risks and complications of this elective surgery being lost in this laudatory celebration?
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Ophthalmic Devices Panel convened Friday to discuss post-LASIK quality-of-life issues. Its recommendation at day's end: That the FDA warn more clearly about the risks of the increasingly popular surgery, the Associated Press reported.
"This is ground-breaking. It's the first time anything like this has happened around refractory, or LASIK, eye surgery," said Dr. Christopher Starr, co-director of Cornea, Cataract and Refractive Surgery at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. "I think it's a good thing, because I know that the surgery, when done on the right patients, is a great, great surgery with phenomenally good outcomes."
According to the LASIK Study Task Force, formed in 2007, studies indicate a 95.4 percent satisfaction rate among patients worldwide. The Task Force consists of the FDA, the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery, the American Academy of Ophthalmology, and the U.S. National Eye Institute.
But of the 7.6 million people who have undergone the procedure in the United States since the mid-1990s, 140 have written letters of complaint to the FDA.
Now the FDA has followed up on those complaints. Friday's hearing was part of a larger review to see if new warnings about LASIK surgery are needed to alert consumers to the possibility of eye pain, dry eyes, blurred or double vision, and other problems.
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