The effect of Lasik surgery on myopic anisometropes' sensory eye dominance

Abstract

Lasik is a common surgery for treating anisometropia. In this study, we asked a specific question: What's the effect of Lasik surgery on anisometropes' sensory eye dominance ? Fifteen myopic anisometropes (mean age: 23 ± 6.9 years old; 6 females) participated in our experiment. We quantitatively measured participants' sensory eye dominance before and after the Lasik surgery using a binocular phase combination paradigm. We found no significant change of sensory eye dominance within 16 weeks (measured between 8 to 96 days, for one or two repetitions) after the surgery (t(14) =-1.44, p = 0.17). A further following on eight patients showed that patients' two eyes were much more balanced at 16 weeks or more (measured one or two times between 112 to 408 days) after the surgery (t(7) =-3.79, p = 0.007). Our results suggest that the benefit of Lasik surgery on anisometropes' sensory eye dominance is not immediate, a long-term adaptation period (16 weeks or more) is necessary to enable the surgery to be truly effective.