Finding out your baby has a congenital cataract can be frightening. It's a diagnosis that calls for fast decisions, at a moment when you barely have time to catch your breath. One of the paths doctors and optometrists often take, once the clouded natural lens has been removed, is to fit the baby with a scleral contact lens rather than implanting an artificial one right away.
Our founder, optometrist Ivan Hare, is one of a small number of specialists in Israel with deep, hands-on experience fitting these lenses on infants. Together with ophthalmologists from Meir Medical Center and Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine, he co-authored a study looking back at how children treated this way in our own clinic actually did over the years. It was published in Eye, a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists.
What the study looked at
The team reviewed 35 children — 50 eyes in total — who were fitted with scleral lenses after cataract surgery between 2004 and 2018. They followed these children for a long time: over five years on average, and in some cases more than a decade. Along the way, they tracked how well the children saw, how comfortably they wore their lenses, and whether any complications came up.
What they found
- Most children ended up with genuinely useful vision — around three in four reached a level better than 20/200, and more than a third reached 20/40 or better.
- The lenses were remarkably well tolerated. Parents reported strong, consistent wear in the vast majority of cases.
- Serious complications were rare. Not a single eye infection was recorded across the entire follow-up period, and the most common side effect was mild, easily managed surface irritation.
- Children treated in both eyes tended to see better than those treated in only one — a pattern that lines up with other research in this field.
- Perhaps most reassuringly: the long-term results held up well against outcomes reported for artificial lens implants in infants, without the need for that additional surgery at such a young age.
What it means for your family
If you're facing a diagnosis like this for your own baby, it's completely natural to feel overwhelmed. What this research adds is real, long-term evidence — not just clinical opinion — that scleral lenses are a safe, comfortable and effective way to manage vision after early cataract surgery. And because they don't involve implanting anything permanent, they leave the door open for an artificial lens later on, if and when that becomes the right choice for your child.
This article is an AI-assisted, plain-language summary of a peer-reviewed study, written for patients and reviewed by our clinical team before publication. It is not a reproduction of the original paper and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Full citation: Yehezkeli V, Hare I, Moisseiev E, Assia EI, Chacham I, Ela-Dalman N. "Assessment of long-term visual outcomes in aphakic children wearing scleral contact lenses." Eye. 2023;37:421–426.