As our eyes age, we find ourselves relying more and more on reading glasses to see things up close, particularly print.

Presbyopia

Even if you’ve enjoyed terrific eye health all your life, you can expect a change after age 40-45 as presbyopia, or stiffening of the eye’s natural crystalline lens, sets in.

As for people who suffer from a refractive error and who have had to wear glasses or contact lenses for most of their lives; by the time they reach 40 they’ll need glasses to see objects far away from them-and objects close up.

Bifocal Glasses for Short and Long Sightedness

This dual need was the reason none other than Benjamin Franklin invented bifocal in 1760. Bifocal lenses are inserted into your corrective eyewear to provide a distance correction on top, and a near-vision correction on the bottom.

This necessitates a lot of peering up and down, leading to distinctive head movements, although bifocals do serve the purpose well by allowing the wearer to see well at both near and distance, simply by either looking through the bottom or top of the glasses.

Trifocal Glasses

Other special types of glasses are often required for individuals who have to see at intermediate distances between near and distance. Such individuals may require trifocals, which have three segments in them depending upon the distance that one intends to look at.

Optilase Offer Alternative to Corrective Eyewear

Happily, for many people a combination of laser eye surgery and/or a corneal inlay can address refractive errors for short and distance vision, as well as the loss of accommodation caused by an ageing lens in the eye (presbyopia).

Patients and medical staff alike are excited about the choices to treat presbyopia, as for a very long time it was thought that nothing could be done to help the condition and that it was unavoidable and untreatable.

Solutions to Presbyopia

There are a few different theories circulating, but the primary idea is that a gradual stiffening of the gel-like substance making up the lens of the eye; combined with a lack of flexibility setting into the cillary muscles that surround the lens, cause presbyopia.

At Optilase, Ophthalmic Surgeons can use one of two methods to treat patients with presbyopia, regardless of other refractive errors they may have.

Corneal Inlays

KAMRA is a corneal inlay with a tiny hole in the middle that gathers all the light entering the eye, focusing it like the aperture of a camera. This gets rid of scattered light rays and ensures the retinal wall at the back of the eye receives a focused beam of light, corralled by the inlay, to form a clear image.

Presbia is also a corneal inlay, using a little flexible Microlens inserted into a pocket created in the cornea to help focus the light entering the eye.

Both methods are available at Optilase. To book a consultation and discover if you are a candidate for either of these revolutionary procedures, call Optilase on +353 1 223 8821 or see our Reading Vision Correction page.