Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Results
By Mayo Clinic staffCataract surgery successfully restores vision in the majority of people who have the procedure done.
Months to years after cataract surgery, you have a 25 percent risk of developing a condition known as posterior capsule opacification (PCO), or second cataract. This happens when the back of the lens capsule — the part of the lens that wasn't removed during surgery and that now supports the lens implant — becomes cloudy and impairs your vision. The gradual clouding is the result of cell growth on the back of the capsule.
To treat PCO, you need a painless, five-minute outpatient procedure called YAG (yttrium-aluminum-garnet) laser capsulotomy. In YAG laser capsulotomy, a laser beam is used to make a small opening in the clouded capsule to let light pass through.
After the procedure, you typically stay in the doctor's office for about an hour to make sure your eye pressure doesn't increase — a potential complication if you have glaucoma or are extremely nearsighted. Other complications are rare but can include swelling of the macula and retinal detachment.
