The influence of axial length on the response to strabismus surgery.

We performed axial length determinations preoperatively on a series of patients undergoing strabismus surgery. A statistically significant inverse correlation was found between axial length and the response (prism diopters per millimeter of medial rectus recession) for esotropic patients. The data suggest that a surgical formula designed to take axial length into account would decrease the variability in response to strabismus surgery in esotropic patients. Poor correlation was found between axial length and response to surgery in exotropic patients. We feel this poor correlation was due, in part, to the postoperative drift rate in exotropic patients as well as inaccuracies with the standard techniques used to determine the basic deviation on which surgery in exotropic patients is based.