Vision Anomaly in Alport Patient Treated with Lens Implant Surgery in Case Study

A young Alport syndrome patient with ocular anomalies improved her vision through an eye surgery called toric multifocal intraocular lens implantation, a procedure that allows the substitution of a deficient eye lens for a tiny, artificial new one.

The study, “Toric Multifocal Intraocular Lens Implantation In A Case Of Bilateral Anterior And Posterior Lenticonus In Alport Syndrome,” was published in the Indian Journal of Ophtalmology.

Alport syndrome, a rare genetic condition, is mainly characterized by kidney failure, hearing loss, and eye problems. One of its main ocular clinical features is lenticonus, in which the eye lens has an abnormal conical shape. This anomaly can be responsible for myopia and astigmatism, two causes  of blurred vision. Although lenticonus can occur with Alport syndrome, this condition is usually anterior in patients, and cases of people with both anterior and posterior lenticonus are rare.

An 18-year-old woman with Alport syndrome was one of those rare cases. The patient had progressively blurred vision in both eyes that had started four or five years previously, and that did not improve with glasses. Eye examinations showed that the patient had high myopia with astigmatism, which also was not corrected with glasses. Further eye analyses revealed the presence of both anterior and posterior lenticonus.

Doctors operated on the patient to extract the damaged eye lens and substitute them with artificial new ones. The operation was carried out in both eyes with a five-day interval.

After the surgery, the patient was treated with several eye drop medications: prednisolone (four times a day for three weeks), moxifloxacin (four times a day for one week), and Nevanac (three times a day for six weeks). At one year follow-up, the patient’s vision had improved in both eyes without further blurring, and she reported being extremely satisfaction  with the surgery.

“Toric multifocal IOL [intraocular lens] offers the opportunity to correct astigmatism and achieve spectacle independence as shown by high satisfaction in our patient,” the researchers wrote.