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What Is A

Cornea

Transplant?

Corneal eye disease is known to one of the common causes for blindness, causing permanent vision loss in more than 10 million people the world over. Usually, the graft is of a dead person who has donated his eyes. Donors can be of any age, but the eyes are healthy at the time of death. A Cornea transplant or grafting is a procedure that uses a donated healthy corneal tissue to replace it in a receiver with diseased or scarred tissue.

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Corneal transplants can be full thickness cornea transplant or penetrating keratoplasty (PK) and Back layer cornea transplant OR endothelial keratoplasty (EK).

In cases where the cornea has become diseased or damaged and affects your vision, such a transplant may become necessary to restore functional vision. Such a transplant can also be helpful in trichiasis, a medical condition where eyelashes turn inward and irritate the eye surface and when the use of eyeglasses or contact lenses are unable to restore functional vision. Some other high-risk conditions are Fuch’s dystrophy, cloudy or swollen cornea advanced Keratoconus, complications from earlier surgery, eye injuries, corneal failure and more.

The skilled procedure is performed by ophthalmologists who specialize in this area, using conservative surgery. A cornea transplant is quite common for restoring vision, pain reduction and for giving damaged or diseased cornea a normal appearance. But sometimes the body may reject the donor cornea, requiring further surgical procedures.

Procedure for

Corneal Transplant

The first stage of the cornea transplant procedure is to relax the patient with a sedative and numb the eye with anaesthesia. The patient is awake yet pain-free.

The surgeon will cut through the abnormal or diseased cornea and remove a small button-sized disk of corneal tissue. For this, a precise round cut is made with the aid of an instrument called the trephine. The donor cornea is first cut to exact fir of the receiver and then placed in the opening cut in the patient.

The surgeon will carefully stitch the new cornea into place using a fine thread. When the donor cornea is rejected by the receiver’s body or unavailable, then an artificial cornea can also be used.