Envision Summit 2025: Pearls for pediatric cataract surgery

At the Envision Summit 2025 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Angela Zhu, MD, offered advice on cataract surgery for all ages, focusing on pediatrics.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Angela Zhu, MD:

Hi everyone. My name is Angela Zhu. I'm an assistant professor of clinical ophthalmology at Bascom Palmer Institute and University of Miami in Miami, Florida. I am here in lovely San Juan, Puerto Rico as part of the Envision Summit 2025, and am speaking as part of the cataract and refractive surgery section. And for that, since I'm a pediatric and adult cornea and cataract specialist, I'm actually giving some tips for pediatric cataract surgery. So I'm proud to be a part of a really esteemed group of specialists from around the country, around the world, even. And the goal is to really share some of the newer insights that we have on cataract surgery for all ages.

So for my talk, specifically, I'll be giving some tips for cataract surgery evereverywhere,m infants to adults, in all different morphologies. Depending on the age of the patient, your priorities really differ. So from infancy, some of your goals may be more visual development. So the goal is really to clear the cataract more so than kind of prioritize refractive correction from an IOL standpoint. But then as you get older into the teenage and later adolescent years, you really start to prioritize visual rehabilitation, because the type of cataracts that you usually see in those ages differ. And then additional factors may play into your decision making, such as history of trauma as a cause of cataracts, or any systemic conditions, syndromes, that may also affect the patient's healing. So all of those things are key things to keep in mind, but really, really important for any pediatric cataract, the main thing is preoperative examination, so that you know what you're dealing with and what to plan for.