Purpose: To investigate corneal astigmatism in children with congenital cataract before surgery.
Materials and methods: We retrospectively reviewed the charts of 99 eyes of 62 patients (74 paired eyes and 25 single eyes) who had undergone congenital cataract surgery from March, 2000 to April, 2012. The mean age at surgery was 32.1±26.9 months. All eyes were examined using an autorefract-keratometer. Cases were divided into 3 groups according to the axis of astigmatism (with-the-rule, against-the-rule and oblique astigmatism).
Result: The mean corneal astigmatism was 2.45±1.28 diopters (D) (range 0.25-6.87 D). The prevalence of corneal astigmatism of 2.0 D or more was 65.7%. The most frequent was astigmatism with-the-rule (83.8%)(mean 2.64±1.25 D), oblique astigmatism was 11.1% (mean 1.43±0.98 D), and 5.1% of the cases had astigmatism against-the-rule (mean 1.55±1.07 D). The mean corneal astigmatism of the eye with cataract (2.46 D) was significantly higher than that of the normal eye (1.66 D) in unilateral cases.
Conclusions: Children with congenital cataract had a high prevalence of large corneal astigmatism ≥2.00 D, that was generally with-the-rule. In the unilateral cataract patients, cataract eyes had higher corneal astigmatism than normal eyes.
Nippon Ganka Gakkai Zasshi (J Jpn Ophthalmol Soc) 118: 98-103, 2014.