Endothelial trauma in the surgery of cataract

Cataract surgery is most common in human surgery and comprises 80% of eye surgery programs. Owing to sophisticated technologies, it has become a routine surgery with lowered complications rate; hence, the functional outcome is more conditioned by operative trauma. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the significance of specular microscopy in the evaluation of operative trauma during extracapsular cataract extraction (ECCE) and phacoemulsification (P), in a controlled environment. The study included 100 consecutive patients who met the established criteria, and groups were formed according to the type of surgery by the assignment of successive numbers from a random number table. Examination and photographs of the corneal endothelium, as well as pachymetry were performed on Keeler-Konan Poclington Specular Microscope (KSP). The obtained results revealed significant dissimilarity in endothelial cell reduction (9.17% in group E, and 4.72% in group P), which generated statistically significant correlation of preoperative and post-operative pachymetry in the group E (p=0.0004). On the basis of the results obtained by specular microscopy, it was concluded that under the same conditions phacoemulsification caused reduced operative trauma of the corneal endothelium.