Are you holding things at arm’s length to see?

Are you finding yourself holding things at arm’s length to see them clearly? You may eb suffering with a condition known as presbyopia.

Presbyopia is a condition that affects just about everybody over the age of 40; it tends to creep up on you gradually and by age 45, you may find yourself holding printed material like papers and jar labels far away from your eye in order to focus on them
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Presbyopia is a different condition to any refractive error you already wear glasses or contacts to combat; and so even if you have previously had laser eye surgery to address a refractive error, you’ll still experience presbyopia.

It’s the medical term for ageing of the eye; specifically, the crystalline lens that becomes less flexible. Over time the lens stiffens and loses its natural elasticity, so cannot get squeezed into shape by the surrounding muscles to focus on close objects.

Deterioration of Near Vision
Your eyes rely on the cornea and lens to bend (refract) light that enters the eye, so that images are focused accurately on the retina.

The cornea is responsible for approximately two thirds of your visual acuity, with the lens making up the remaining one third of refractive power.

The lens constantly changes shape to accommodate vision at different distance, with near vision requiring a greater amount of focusing power.

With presbyopia, the lens can no longer accommodate for objects up close which is why images will appear blurred unless they are held at a greater distance from the eyes.

Presbyopia will continue to affect the lens until the condition stabilises, usually around the age of 65.

Excellent Options at Optilase for presbyopic patients
At Optilase, we offer a few different treatment options. Glasses can be prescribed to presbyopic patients by any optician but reading glasses can be considered a classic sign of old age and not suit everyone.

Innovative corneal inlays have been perfected in recent years and there are two types available from Optilase in a quick and minimally invasive procedure.

Optilase offers KAMRA Reading Vision Treatment, which involves placing a tiny doughnut-shaped implant in the cornea of your non- dominant eye, corralling light rays like the aperture of a camera. This creates a kind of pinhole effect, so that the eye can see near and intermediate objects clearly, without compromising on distance vision.

Optilase also offer Presbia, another type of corneal inlay that is implanted in the non-dominant eye to improve near vision and eliminate the need for reading glasses. The type of inlay recommended will depend on your specific vision issues.

For more information on Presbia and KAMRA inlays, call Optilase on +353 1 223 8821 or see here