Small incision cataract surgery in rural communities in Uttar Pradesh: A clinical study of postoperative complications and visual outcomes at a tertiary eye hospital

Abstract

To study the incidence of postoperative complications and visual outcome following manual small incision cataract surgery.This is a hospital-based retrospective study comprised of 1020 eyes of 1020 cataract patients above 31 years without any systemic illness. This study was overseen in a rural tertiary hospital in North India from November 2020 to February 2021. All patients were analyzed according to their history, age, sex and a thorough clinical examination was done. Manual small incision cataract surgery was done for all patients, and they were examined on the first postoperative day and after 1 month.In our study 57% of patients are male and 43% are female. The maximum number of patients were in the age group of 61–70 years. Intraoperative complications PC rent noticed in 1 case zonular dehiscence in 2 patients, and 3 patients were left aphakic. On the first post-op day, Striate keratopathy was 2%, Residual cortex 3%, FM Threads 9%, Anterior uveitis cells 3%, Blood clots & Dispersive hyphema 3%, Epithelial defects 1%, Corneal edema 4% were seen. Post-operative uncorrected vision at day one 83% of cases achieved good visual acuity (≥ 6/18) and the rest 16% were borderline acuity (<6/18-6/60), which at 1-month post-operative day good visual acuity improved to 87% of cases. Small incision cataract surgery (SICS) with Posterior chamber intraocular lens (PCIOL) is an approved method of community-premised cataract surgery to overcome the large cataract reserve in our country it gives consistently good visual acuity post-operatively and negligible complications.