In short, yes definitely! Your eye pressure will affect whether or not you are suitable for LASIK.
Long answer:
Your eye pressure is an indication of your glaucoma risk.
Although everyone’s eye pressure fluctuates on a daily basis (it even varies depending on the time of day), a normal person’s eye pressure should be consistently within the range of 8 to 21.
If your eye pressure is ever recorded as higher than 21, you may need further tests to evaluate the possibility of glaucoma.
Having said that, it must be reiterated that not all eye pressure machines measure eye pressure in the same way, and hence there may be inaccuracies (or falsely high readings) sometimes.
Your eye doctor will be able to tell you which is the most accurate method to measure your eye pressure.
So why does eye pressure affect LASIK (and vice versa)?
Everyone’s eye pressure measurements are dependent on their eye cornea thickness. A thicker cornea gives a higher pressure reading and similarly, a thinner cornea yields a lower pressure reading.
In LASIK, the cornea is thinned out in order to correct the refractive power. This thin cornea will lead to an artificially lower eye pressure recording. So that effectively means that a person with glaucoma (high eye pressure) who had LASIK done, would be measured as having normal or low eye pressure, but falsely so.
This is potentially dangerous because post-LASIK patients with glaucoma could go undetected.
In my practice, I have come across many such post-LASIK patients who had their glaucoma diagnoses missed by other doctors due to their seemingly normal eye pressures.
After they sought a second opinion with me and taking into consideration their thin corneas, we were able to elicit that their true eye pressures were high. Unfortunately, many of them had already suffered irreversible vision loss since detection was too late.
LASIK does NOT increase your risk of glaucoma. LASIK does however make the detection and monitoring of glaucoma more difficult. Difficult, but not impossible.
It is thus necessary to rely on your trusted eye doctor to be astute at using better methods (other than eye pressure) to detect and monitor glaucoma effectively.
Hence, if there is any indication at all that you might be at risk of glaucoma, it would be prudent for your eye doctor to counsel adequately regarding your suitability for LASIK.
I hope that this was easy to understand and helpful to you!
