Patients who suffer a penetrating corneal injury don’t just have pain, infection risk and corneal scarring to contend with. Japanese researchers recently discovered that corneal scarring after traumatic perforations also increases corneal higher-order aberrations (HOAs).

This retrospective consecutive case study evaluated 40 eyes of 40 patients treated for traumatic corneal perforation and 18 healthy control eyes. The team analyzed HOAs of the anterior and posterior corneal surfaces of each eye using swept-source optical coherence tomography. They then assessed the correlation between corneal HOAs and visual acuity (VA).

The researchers found that HOAs with maximum diameters of 4mm and 6mm were significantly larger in eyes that had experienced a corneal perforation.

The study concludes that there is a significant correlation between VA and corneal HOAs, which have a direct effect on VA.