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MALE VOICE: If you suffer from cataracts, you may be surprised to know there is a new procedure that replaces the lens in your eye with an implant so you will no longer need glasses to see far away or read small print. Dr. Wu tells us more.

DR. HELEN WU: For people with cataracts or for people with beginning cataracts who are looking to improve their vision with refractive surgery such as laser vision correction, we have a state of the art medical procedure called presbiopic lens implants that can allow you to become independent of glasses at both distance and near.

These lens implants are implanted inside your eye. And they are made of acrylic or silicone material, and they are essentially lens implants, the standard lens implants that we use for cataract surgery. And they are called Restore, Resume and Crystalens. There are three types that are on the market right now that are commercially approved and commercially available.

As far at the procedure is concerned, these are generally done under local anesthesia, just like standard cataract surgery. It is a standard cataract surgery technique so these patients come to either a hospital or a surgery center. They have an intravenous line put in and a little mild sedative given so that takes the edge off their anxiety. And then they have either eye drops to numb up their eye, or they may have a local anesthetic right beside the eye to numb up the area around the eye so that they don't feel the procedure.

The procedure itself is made with a smaller than a 3 mm incision at the side of the eye. And what we do is we take out the cloudy lens, the crystalline lens that the patient, that the patient was born with, and we replace it with this lens implant. You use an ultrasonic device to break up the cloudy, crystalline lens, which is called the cataract, and then the cloudy part is aspirated or vacuumed up. And then in that remaining capsule is placed the intraocular lens, an artificial lens implant. So it's a very standard cataract surgery technique, and then we may or may not use a stitch afterwards. And the patient goes home with a shield over the eye and comes back the next day for follow up, very simple and straightforward.

We also do this procedure for patients who do not have cataracts. Some of those people, for example, have very high farsightedness, like, let's say their glasses are super thick and they're very young and they're looking to have Lasik and they're not an appropriate candidate so we may do a clear lens extraction in those patients. It's the same surgery as a cataract surgery. We take out their lens and we replace their lens, but they don't have a cataract, that's all. So, I've done it in a young as a 30-year-old.

After standard cataract surgery, typically, patients will see well at distance clearly, but they need to put on glasses to see their computers or to read books. But with one of these presbiopic lens implants, you can see clearly at all distances and very rarely have to put on a pair of spectacles.