Yassine Daoud, M.D., an associate professor at Wilmer Eye Institute, Johns Hopkins Medicine and Chair of Ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins Howard County General Hospital, will be speaking at Ophthalmology Times’ EyeCon 2022 in Marco Island, Florida, Dec. 17. Daoud will be part of a panel entitled “Intraocular Lenses in Complex Cases.”

We spoke with Daoud prior to the conference to learn more about what he’ll be talking about.

What will you be presenting on at EyeCon 2022?

The major thing that I want to present is how to basically chaperone complex cataract surgery patients to a good outcome, despite having complex eyes or suboptimal presentation of a disease. My goal is to give the treating surgeons surgical pearls to optimize a suboptimal situation, whether it is before the surgery, during the surgery or after the surgery.

What advice do you give surgeons who are in this kind of situation?

First of all, prevention is better than cure. Identifying which patients may have complex or complicated situations will help serve you incredibly well during the surgery itself, as will knowing your limits and the limits of the technology you’re using.

How frequently do complex or complicated cases occur?

Nationally, complications in routine cataract surgeries happen to be about 1 to 3% of cases. This may sound like a small figure, because cataract surgery is one of the safest surgeries in all of medicine, but when you think about it, we are doing a little more than 3 million surgeries in this country a year, so that’s about 90,000 complications a year.

What do you want attendees to take away from your presentation?

Number one is, if you think about doing something, do it before it’s too late. For example, if you need to stain the capsule to improve your view, do it at the very beginning rather than wishing you had done it. Number two, if you need to use any instruments to, for example, have better dilation of the iris, do that at the beginning rather than later. Number three, identifying a problem early will lead to a better solution, so the sooner you identify a problem, the sooner the solution and the better the outcome.