Dr. Hummel - Vision Blog

Monday, February 25, 2008

Presbyopia: How is it Treated?

Perhaps you have had normal vision all your life and never had to bother with glasses or contact lenses. Perhaps you are now a little older and have to hold the magazine at arm’s length to see it clearly. This is the annoying, age-related condition of presbyopia. Where a LASIK treatment can take care of nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism, it cannot treat presbyopia. Why not?

The cause is different. Presbyopia creeps up on us gradually because aging is gradual, and the eye’s crystalline lens is slowly aging. It is becoming stiffer. And the tiny muscles which control its curvature are probably becoming a little weaker too. You no doubt still have 20/20 eyes, but their lenses can no longer accommodate properly.

Accommodation is the lens’ ability to change its curvature according to how far away an object is that we are looking at. In a normal eye, the lens can automatically become rounder or flatter, so as to bend the incoming light rays appropriately for the distance of the object. In an aging eye, it becomes “stuck” at a certain convexity such that distant objects are still clear, but not close objects.

Ophthalmologists have no way to restore flexibility to the lens. But they can replace it with an intraocular lens (IOL).There are three well-established IOLs: ReZoom, ReSTOR, and Crystalens. They are made by three different companies and use three different technologies to give you clear vision at multiple distances.

posted by Patti at 3:23 PM 0 comments

 

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