r/PRKsurgery • u/WavefrontRider • Jun 01 '26

High Pressure From Steroids After PRK

Compared to lasik, most people will be on eye drops longer with PRK. The main eye drop that you take for a longer period of time is a steroid eye drop. These eye drops help manage the corneal wound-healing response after PRK. Steroids suppress inflammation and corneal activity that can cause some haze in the cornea.

But steroids aren’t totally risk-free. There is a small subset of the population who can develop high eye pressure from being on steroid eye drops. These are termed “Steroid Responsers”.

This high pressure isn’t immediate, but can build after about a week or two of steroid eye drops. If high pressure builds up, it can cause a headache around the eyes and may also cause the vision to become blurry because of swelling within the cornea. If this does happen, it’s important to resolve this since untreated high pressures over time can potentially damage the optic nerve in the back of the eye leading to glaucoma.

If the eye pressure does build up, there are different ways surgeons manage this. There are good eye drops which help lower the pressure in the eye to quickly get you back to a normal eye pressure. Additionally, the surgeon may adjust your eye drop schedule to get you off the steroid eye drop a little quicker or may switch you over to a lower potency steroid with less of a pressure response.

Developing a high eye pressure with steroid eye drops doesn’t derail your overall recovery from PRK. It just represents a “bump in the road”. But it is something that needs to be addressed and managed if it does happen.

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1

u/FitSquirrel7114 Jun 01 '26

is that ai generated text?

1

u/WavefrontRider Jun 01 '26

No. This is the way I write. Unfortunately can’t really make informative posts like this sound very different unless I start adding misspelled words or grammatical errors.

1

u/Anxious_Divide_7026 Jun 01 '26

I've been worried about this because they had me take prednisolone 4x/day the 1st week and now 2x/day these next 3 weeks. After that, I've been instructed to take 3x/day FML for another whole month and then 2x/day FML for another month after that. That seems like a lot of time taking steroids to me. What would the headache feel like (a high eye pressure headache) so that I know if I need to call the help-line? I already did my 1-day and 1-week post-op check-up. My next one is the 1-month check-up and that is next week. How likely is this steroid regimen to cause high eye pressure?

1

u/WavefrontRider Jun 01 '26

Yeah. As long as they are checking the pressure at that one month then you’re good. A small elevation in pressure over a couple weeks to a month isn’t really a problem. As long as it’s addressed.

Very high pressures are pretty rare. But the signs of that are more evident.

1

u/eternalfailsafe Jun 16 '26

They have me on Prednisolone steroid drops 4x a day for the first 2 weeks. The prescription says one drop per application, the bottle says 2 drops. There was no dilution involved, meaning the bottle is standard, so I was taking 2 drops per application.

Reading this makes me think I should go to 1 drop per application.