Reddit reviews Corneal Cross-Linking

Here's a question: are you actually in the US?

I work for a surgeon in Zurich (currently redoing the English-language website) that was developing CXL back in the day (Farhad Hafezi), and continues to research what's going on at the molecular level in keratoconic corneas, and how to improve CXL (his research group showed the importance of oxygen availability in the reaction, and why that limits how fast CXL can be performed, for example) https://www.elza-institute.com/corneal-cross-linking-cxl/ - he also co-wrote the textbook! https://www.amazon.com/Corneal-Cross-Linking-Farhad-Hafezi-MD/dp/1630912107

I have thin corneas, so I'm absolutely delighted I work for the ELZA Institute and can have them monitored regularly and easily. :)

If you are in the US, on the West Coast, the other author of the textbook is J. Bradley Randleman (https://eye.keckmedicine.org/doctors/j-bradley-randleman/) and he's wonderful at it too.

Practically, though, there are many good cornea specialists out there (and everyone's right - you need a cornea specialist) whatever country you are in. What's most important is getting treated. IMHO, you need to have a surgeon that's offering epi-off CXL. Epi-on is getting better, but it's not there yet. You want CXL to stop your KC progressing; why risk it? And Epi-on risks that far more than epi-off.


One thing my boss can do that is above and beyond regular CXL in keratoconus is also perform a custom Trans-PRK laser ablation - you'd be very unlikely to be 20/20 afterwards like most laser refractive procedures, but you would have an easier time of it with sclerals etc. Hafezi did a lot of the development with one of the laser manufacturers, Schwind, to get their excimer algorithms right in post-CXL corneas, so if anyone knows how to do that best, it's him.