Ophthalmic advice wanted: do replacement lenses from cataract surgery ever require cleaning?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My husband, 73, had cataract surgery on both his eyes, and it was around 16-18 years ago. His vision has been excellent since then, as far as I knew. However, a new ophthalmologist has told him that his lenses are dirty and need to be cleaned (bear in mind that he is repeating to me what the doctor said, I was not in the room, and also that English is not his first language). They are going to do one at a time, the first one is tomorrow.

He hadn’t complained to me about worsening vision at all, but that is very much his character, he doesn’t mention anything going slightly wrong, it has to get serious before he mentions it. Anyway, here is the timeline, which may or may not be relevant.

Late March, his annual checkup reveals he has crossed the line into Type II Diabetes. Among other things his PCP recommends regular visits to an ophthalmologist to check if there has been any effect on his eyes and vision.

Late April, I think, he first saw this ophthalmologist who said there was nothing wrong with his eyes of the sort that would be caused by diabetes, but who found a small hole in the body of the eye that needed to be repaired by a laser, which she had in her other (main) office, and she could see him to do the procedure three days later. This was followed by a month of eye drops and a follow-up visit today. As far as I have been told by my husband at the time, there was no mention of fuzzy vision during this first visit, but I wasn’t in the room.

Today’s followup visit found the hole is completely healed, but there is this issue of the dirty lenses. Tomorrow’s visit will clean one eye’s lens, then the other eye will be scheduled.

So back to the original question, can replacement lenses after cataract surgery ever get dirty and require cleaning? As a bonus, if you know, how is the cleaning usually done?

2

Could it be what’s described in this PDF?

3

Allowing for language-based confusion, that could well be it. Thanks.

It makes me wonder why the doctor didn’t find it the first time around. But my husband likes this doctor so I can’t dig much deeper than I already have.

4

I’m not a doctor. I had my foggy natural lenses removed and replaced in 2007. A few months (?) later, the same surgeon used a laser to cut a + in the tissue behind the lenses to open up a hole there because that tissue was blurring my vision. He said that extra incision was becoming a standard part of the transplant procedure.

I have never needed to have my synthetic lenses cleaned.

5

Yes, that’s the gist of the PDF that BigT linked to. That makes a lot more sense than “cleaning the lenses” but I can guess how my husband got confused.

6

Rather late, but agreed on all counts. I had my bionic eyes installed when I was 59. I was told that there’s a strong correlation between age at implant, and the likelihood of needing a capsulotomy - as in, younger patients were likelier to need it. Sure enough, I needed it within the year.

7

Had double cataract surgeries when I was 44. Within three years, my right eye required a capsulotomy. My left eye has been needing once since fall 2019, but I kicked the can a little too long and the pandemic got in the way. At the moment, I don’t have functional vision in my left eye.