14 DAY TRIAL // A 42-year-old man from California is now making headlines, and has a scientific paper recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine to thank for it.
The paper in question hit the public eye this January, and details how, after suffering a work accident, the man ended up sporting a star-shaped cataract in each of his eyes.
According to Mirror, the accident that led to the man's cataracts took place about 10 years ago. At that time, the patient worked as an electrician.
While on the job, he accidentally came too close to a live wire, and got electrocuted. Specifically, the wire touched his shoulder, and the man received a 14,000-volt electrical shock.
As explained in said paper, this accidental electrocution caused the man to develop star-shaped cataracts, or, as doctors like to call this fairly odd condition, “bilateral stellate anterior subcapsular opacities of the lens.”
Interestingly enough, specialists have not yet managed to find a suitable explanation for why the cataracts took this shape and not another, more random, one.
The doctors who treated the unnamed man explain that, when the 14,000 volts surged through his body, his optic nerve was also affected.
Hence, despite the fact that it has been about a decade since the accident took place, the man is still having trouble seeing.
“The extreme current and voltage that passed through this important natural wire caused damage to the optic nerve itself,” Dr. Bobby Korn with the University of California, San Diego told the press.
This is not the first time when the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a paper detailing a case of star-shaped cataracts.
Thus, back in April 2013, the publication issued a report explaining how an Austrian man developed the very same condition not after being electrocuted, but after getting punched in the eye.
Apparently, this patient ended up sporting a star in one of his eyes due to the fact that shock waves resulting from the blow caused his eye's lens to become opaque in certain areas.