Strabismus surgery
Overview
Surgery
Surgery is an ancient medical specialty that uses operative manual and instrumental techniques on a patient to investigate and/or treat a pathological condition such as disease or injury, or to help improve bodily function or appearance.An act of performing surgery may be called a surgical...
on the extraocular muscles to correct the misalignment of the eye
Human eye
The human eye is an organ which reacts to light for several purposes. As a conscious sense organ, the eye allows vision. Rod and cone cells in the retina allow conscious light perception and vision including color differentiation and the perception of depth...
s. With approximately 1.2 million procedures each year, extraocular muscle surgery is the third most common eye surgery in the United States.
- Eye muscle surgeries typically correct strabismusStrabismusStrabismus is a condition in which the eyes are not properly aligned with each other. It typically involves a lack of coordination between the extraocular muscles, which prevents bringing the gaze of each eye to the same point in space and preventing proper binocular vision, which may adversely...
and include the following:- Loosening / weakening procedures
- Recession involves moving the insertion of a muscle posteriorly towards its origin.
- Myectomy
- Myotomy
- Tenectomy
- Tenotomy
- Tightening / strengthening procedures
- Resection involves detaching one of the eye muscles, removing a portion of the muscle from the distal end of the muscle and reattaching the muscle to the eye.
- Tucking
- Advancement is the movement of an eye muscle from its original place of attachment on the eyeball to a more forward position.
- Transposition / repositioning procedures
- Adjustable suture surgery is a method of reattaching an extraocular muscle by means of a stitch that can be shortened or lengthened within the first post-operative day, to obtain better ocular alignment.
- Loosening / weakening procedures
Strabismus surgery is a one day procedure.
