GroOs out? (You Can Do It).

Can't bear to look? Stitching up an incision to finish a successful cataract surgery will help this patient do just that: see clearly. A cataract occurs when the eye's clear lens--located behind the pupil (dark central circle) and iris (colored part surrounding the pupil)--becomes cloudy.

"The eye works like a camera," says ophthalmologist (eye doctor) Dr. Andrew Iwach of the University of California. The lens focuses light coming through the cornea, or clear outer eye layer; the retina, or light-sensitive membrane at the inner eyeball, accepts light signals just like camera film. Those signals, transferred via the optic nerve to the brain, become the images you see. But when the lens is hazy, light entering the eye is blocked, resulting in dim, out-of-focus images.

What causes cataracts? An eye's aging lens naturally becomes opaque (cloudy). "If you live long enough, you'll eventually develop them," says Iwach. Cataracts are the leading cause of vision loss among the elderly, and only surgery corrects them. One new technique: phacoemulsification, which uses tiny forceps and scalpel, microscopes, and ultrasound, vibrating sound waves above audible human frequency, that break up the cataract. The lens is then removed through a 2.5-millimeter (0.1-inch)-long incision. A plastic, intraocular (inside the eye) lens is then implanted through the opening.