Corneal Transplantation

Throughout the years, organ transplantation is said to be the most important discovery that our inventors have created. Aside from the astonishing qualities and functions of this discovery, it gave a significant impact on medical technology. It gives hopes to the people whose conditions seems severe and gave life in creating a better improvement in aiding. The inventions of transplant started in the 20th century. This is the time where technology has become more advanced and improved a lot throughout the years. Corneal transplantation is one of the inventions that give a lot of advantages in medical technology, and it is the most common allogeneic transplantation that is known worldwide. This surgery is named and known for the given success it gave to the tissue grafting procedure in the whole world.

Upon the advancement of different techniques, such as microsurgery, pharmacology, immunology, and corneal grafting, technology enhanced the success of optical graft technologies and corneal transplantations. The method of corneal transplantation or corneal grafting, the diseased cornea is being replaced by a new pair of the cornea that is given by the donor. There is a huge requirement in being a donor, and one must not have any past issues of their cornea or even any part of the eye that may cause complications during the transplant. Although for some people, the transplant doesn’t usually work a 100% as it shows, for some, there may erupt some complications, or the person may reject the given cornea from the donor.

The corneal transplantation or corneal graft comes in two parts. The first one is when the persons’ cornea is entirely replaced. This process is called as the penetrating keratoplasty. And another type of cornea graft is lamellar keratoplasty in where the cornea is not entirely replaced. There are only some parts of the cornea that is needed to be replaced. In severe cases, people with tough conditions go for the penetrating keratoplasty to create more wanted results. And for people whose conditions are not that elongated, they can go for the lamellar keratoplasty. The term keratoplasty means cornea surgery or transplant. The surgery is to be decided by both people, and the donor should have no sign of any disorder or it may cause infection, or the whole process may lead to failure. It may also have different complication for the patient’s health.

The cornea as you can see is transparent and it is on the most anterior part of the eyes. The cornea covers the layers of the eyes such as the pupil, iris and the anterior chamber. The procedure in replacing the cornea is to be held by eye experts of ophthalmologists and to be done with patients with these types of conditions. On the part of the donors, there is no specific age in giving their eyes as long as they have the willingness to provide it. The process of cornea transplantation is to be performed with the use of medicines when the keratoconus type of surgery cannot be able to heal the cornea.

Medical Uses of Corneal Transplant

The first use of the corneal transplant is optical. This is used to improve the visual insight of the person by replacing the distorted part of the eye of the patient by a clear and healthy tissue from the donor.

Tectonic/reconstructive. The purpose of this is to preserve the corneal anatomy of the person that is encountering stromal thinning of the tissue to be encounter in the cornea. It is to prevent it from getting thinner.

Therapeutic. In this part, the purpose of corneal transplantation is to remove the unresponsive corneal tissue when being treated such as antibiotics and so.

Cosmetics. This part is when people use corneal transplantation to improve their optical appearances such as corneal scars or those opaque corneas with white hue in their tissues.

Risks of the Corneal Transplant

The corneal transplant is to be the most known treatment in corneal distortion. This has come to various research and findings that let the researchers gather more information in creating more analysis in the corneal graft. Along the way, there is a risk that are to be encountered when undergoing this kind of transplant, one of each is when the cornea of the patient rejects the ’donors’ corneal tissue. This may lead to some severe complications and may even make the operation a failure. The risk of failure of the cornea is about 20%.

Another type of risk that is to be encountered during operation is the risk for infection. That is why the donors are to be advisable to have no issue of past diseases in their cornea or this may lead to some infection and may cause the patient to be blind. The cornea or the eye does not have any blood vessels, meaning it has a long time of healing than the common parts of the body. There might be some cases that during the operation, it may cause infections from microorganisms.

The failure of the corneal graft may happen during the actual transplantation of the cornea and also after a decade. Meaning the risk for complications does not end during the transplantation, but there might be some after effect as the time passed by.

Procedure

Just like another type of operations, the patient will enter the operating room. Then the patient will lie down, and they will be giving some operating anesthesia. After that, the team including the ophthalmologist will prepare the various materials needed in operation. They will lubricate the eye to avoid drying of the eye. There will be specific types of operations that will be handed to the person having this kind of transplant. The operation will depend on the person’s conditions. There are preoperative examinations, penetrating keratoplasty, lamellar keratoplasty, deep anterior lamellar keratoplasty, and endothelial keratoplasty.

There are also some synthetic corneas that can be used for replacement of cornea, and also alternatives such as contact lenses. The choices to be made by the patients will also require the ophthalmologists’ prescriptions.