[Monitoring of vision development following early surgery of congenital cataracts using the Acuity-card method].

The recently developed acuity card procedure provides rapid assessment of visual acuity in preverbal infants and thus offers the possibility of monitoring the visual development of infants after early surgery for congenital cataract. This report describes our experience with these acuity cards in seven patients with bilateral and seven patients with unilateral congenital cataract. The age at operation was between 1 week and 17 months; visual acuity was assessed up to an age of maximally 2.5 years. In agreement with previous reports, the development of acuity in infants with unilateral aphakia was better if surgery had occurred within the first 6 months of life than at a later time. The results of acuity assessment were generally in good agreement with the clinical signs. The advantages of the acuity cards in clinical use are that: (1) they provide an additional criterion for surgery, including cases of secondary cataract formation; (2) they allow early assessment of the success of the operation; (3) they can be used to judge occlusion therapy; (4) they have proved to be highly motivating for parents to comply conscientiously with the therapeutic measures. Thus, the acuity card procedure has proved to be extremely useful for the assessment of visual development in infants operated on for congenital cataract.