MUST READ: 4 Ways To Protect Yourself From Cataracts
Yet, Chen’s study — reported April 16 in the New England Journal of Medicine — found that more than half of Medicare patients who had cataract surgery in 2011 underwent at least one test beforehand.
That included blood work, urine tests to measure kidney function, and tests of heart and lung function — such as exercise stress tests and electrocardiograms.
Chen stressed, however, that “this doesn’t mean doctors are doing it for the money.”
For years, it was simply standard practice to do preoperative testing, she said. Cataract patients are usually elderly and often have chronic health conditions, so it was considered prudent to “be thorough,” Chen explained.
And years ago, cataract surgery took longer and was more extensive than it is today, she added.
Guidelines advising against routine testing came out in 2002. Chen said research shows that it takes an average of 17 years for new guidelines to become pervasive in everyday medical practice.
“So we weren’t actually surprised by our findings,” she said.
Most people eventually develop cataracts with age, according to the U.S. National Eye Institute. By age 80, the agency says, 70 percent of white Americans have cataracts, as do more than half of blacks and about 60 percent of Hispanics.
People can often deal with cataracts by getting a new eyeglass prescription or using brighter lighting. But once their vision problems get in the way of daily life, surgery is the only effective treatment, the eye institute suggests.
The new findings are based on Medicare records for nearly 441,000 patients who had cataract surgery in 2011.
Chen’s team found that 53 percent had one or more tests in the month before their surgery, and the main driving factor was eye doctor preference, rather than patient health.
Roughly one-third of ophthalmologists ordered tests for nearly all of their patients, the study found.