Male1: Babies are born and the timing is premature and they make an ophthalmologist see you in the hospital maybe even a month later, why is that?
Male2: The blood vessels in the back of the eye are normally growing until normal full term or 40 weeks after conception, so when a child comes in premature, the blood vessels in the back of the eyes have not grown in fully. As a child is growing outside of the womb, with a premature, sometimes, the blood vessels start growing abnormally and that is a condition called retinopathy of prematurity or ROP for short.
When a child has ROP, most of the time, those blood vessels that were abnormal will go back to being normal on their own, however, sometimes, they will get worse and continue to get worse, and sometimes, we need to treat with laser or have other more involved surgery in order to try to save the vision of the patient. Sometimes even the type of this treatment, the vision will not be good in the child, however, with most of the patients that are treated with laser end up having good vision.
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