Diseases & Conditions Archive

What Is It?

The cornea is the clear, round, "window" of tissue that allows light to enter the front of the eye. If the cornea becomes severely diseased or damaged, it can distort or even block the normal path of light into the eye. When this happens, light does not focus normally on the retina, the layer at the back of the eye that is responsible for sight. As a result, there can be a significant loss of vision in the affected eye.

When corneal conditions cause serious, irreversible vision problems, a corneal transplant often is the best solution. In a corneal transplant, an eye surgeon first removes the diseased or damaged area of cornea. The removed tissue then is replaced by a section of healthy cornea that has been taken from the eye of a dead donor.

What Is It?

A heart transplant is surgery in which a patient with a life-threatening heart problem receives a new, healthy heart from a person who has died. In a heart transplant, the patient who receives the new heart (the recipient) is someone who has a 30 percent or greater risk of dying within 1 year without a new heart. Although there is no absolute age limit, most transplants are performed on patients younger than 70 years old.

The person who provides the healthy heart (the donor) is usually someone who has been declared brain dead and is still on life-support machinery. Heart donors are usually younger than 50, have no history of heart problems, and do not have any infectious diseases.

What Is It?

In lung transplant surgery, someone with life-threatening respiratory problems is given one or two healthy lungs taken from a person who has died. If one lung is transplanted, the procedure is called a single-lung transplant. If both lungs are transplanted, it is a bilateral or double-lung transplant.

Lungs for transplantation usually come from young, healthy people who have had severe brain damage because of trauma or cardiac arrest (a stopped heart). Their lungs and other organs are maintained with life-support machinery.

If you’re like most people with hearing loss, you’ll probably find that it takes time to accept the idea that you need a hearing aid, and you may be unhappy when your audiologist recommends that you get not one, but two. Chances are that your first question will be, “Is it normal to get two hearing aids?” And then, “Do I really need two?”

If you have hearing loss in only one ear and normal or nearly normal hearing in the other, then one hearing aid is all you need. But most people have hearing loss in both ears, especially if the loss is age-related. (You may have one ear that’s better than the other, but chances are both will be in the same ballpark.) In that case, research and experience suggest that you’ll ultimately be more satis­fied with two hearing aids.

You have a brief window to seek treatment.

Everyone's hearing naturally declines with age, and people often have one ear that hears better than the other. But if hearing loss appears suddenly in one ear for no apparent reason, you may have experienced sudden sensorineural hearing loss, or SHL, a kind of nerve deafness.

There are about 66,000 new cases of SHL per year in the United States, according to research in the August 2019 issue of Otolaryngology — Head and Neck Surgery. But these numbers are hard to come by, since the condition may be underdiagnosed.

Ask the doctors

Q. My mother is in her late 80s. She received the flu vaccine this year, but I heard that it won't be as effective because of her age. Is this true?

A. The flu vaccine can be less effective in elderly adults. That's because the flu vaccine works by priming the body's own immune system to mount a response to the virus if it's encountered. Older adults may have weaker immune systems, and therefore a weaker immune response to the vaccine.

Palliative care improves comfort and quality of life for people with serious illness and their families, yet many people who could benefit from these services are not taking advantage of them

Ignoring symptoms of this carpal tunnel syndrome can lead to permanent nerve damage.

First, you may notice tingling or numbness in your fingers that comes and goes. Over time, the sensations may get worse, lasting longer or even waking you up at night. Eventually the pain and numbness might even make it hard to grip things like a fork, a pen, or other objects.

If you're having these symptoms, it could be carpal tunnel syndrome, which occurs when the median nerve — which runs down your arm and into your hand — is compressed by a ligament that crosses over it as it passes through a narrow space in the wrist known as the carpal tunnel.

Even after cataracts are successfully removed, a new problem may bring back the same symptoms.

When the clear lens inside your eye becomes cloudy, it's called a cataract. Cataracts are a common cause of poor vision in older age, with symptoms such as blurry vision and the appearance of halos around lights. Doctors can restore your vision by removing the cloudy lens and replacing it with an artificial lens implant.

But sometimes a side effect of the procedure triggers the return of cataract symptoms. The side effect is called posterior capsule opacification, also known as a secondary cataract. "This affects about a third of people who have cataract surgery. It's one of the reasons we ask people to come back for follow-ups," says Dr. Roberto Pineda, a cataract surgeon at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear.