“Does LASIK surgery have any side effects in the long term?”

It most often will cause dry eyes down the road as well as some increased nighttime glare.

A persistent dry eye is a common occurrence. Depending on the exact refractive procedure performed, patients with higher prescriptions and thinner corneas may sometimes need an enhancement.

Dr. Lior Koppel

Depending on your prescription, regression can occur in about ten years. It doesn't always but certainly can. It depends on many factors, such as corneal thickness, astigmatism, degree of myopia among them.

For most people experiencing LASIK, it is a life-changing adventure. Depending upon your age, you may need reading glasses at an earlier age. Anything you do with your glasses OFF now may require near focus glasses. If you select mono vision with one eye for near and one eye for distance vision, you will be sacrificing some binocularity and depth perception. There may be some regression, but as most LASIK surgery centers seek to provide vision sufficient for driving, you may have to wait until you are at 20/40 before the enhancement is available. Most patients reach 20/20 initially and the decline may not become apparent for 7 to 10 years. At that time, the patient may need bifocals due to stacking up birthdays and as they will be using glassed a lot, they forego the enhancement. Unpredictable medical corneal degenerations are factors independent of LASIK surgeries.

Eventually needing to wear glasses. Poor contact lens performance on a compromised eye, glare at night, dry eye, thin corneas that make calculation of lens implants more difficult and less predictable for cataract surgery, imperfect correction but a psychological mutation that causes one to think that they see great even when they do not.

LASIK is not a permanent fix for vision. In my practices, I have seen numerous patients coming back 10-15 years after the surgery, needing prescription glasses. Patients in their 40s will need some kind of reading Rx even after LASIK. Some side effects are dry eyes, aberrations, distortion at night time driving, halos, etc.

Patients considering LASIK should wait until 25 years of age, have 1-2 years of stable prescription, and have thick, regular cornea. If the patient is a good candidate then they can proceed with LASIK. It is hard to predict which patients will need a touch down the road but it may be performed, if needed. The major side effects of LASIK may be dry eyes and glare/haloes at night but these side effects are very uncommon and often short lived.