Go ahead with surgery to reverse or reduce presbyopia
People usually develop a condition called presbyopia typically beginning between the ages of 40 and 50. Presbyopia is the inability of the eye to focus at all distances, usually noticed when fine print starts to blur. It sometimes even results in blindness, as a result of muscular degeneration.
Presbyopia is the primary reason that nearly everyone after their mid-40’s uses bifocals, reading glasses, or removes their distance glasses in order to read at a comfortable distance. With age, the power of the eye begins to deteriorate, and focusing objects up close becomes more of a strain. Some people embrace it as a sign of wisdom and maturity, and others try to disguise it, grasping desperately to what they perceive to be their fading youth. Presbyopia is caused either by stiffening of the eye’s lens, continued growth of the lens or atrophy of the muscles controlling the lens, but other theories exist as well.
In the past, the usual remedy was to wear reading glasses for presbyopia. But now in modern times, surgical remedies for presbyopia also are available for qualified candidates. One of the first effective surgical options for presbyopia correction involved producing what is known as monovision during LASIK. Other surgical procedures such as conductive CK, also exist and they which give eye surgeons additional options for correcting this common vision problem.
Monovision and LASIK:
Monovision is the term for the surgical correction of one eye to achieve enhanced vision up close. Normally, both your eyes work together equally when you look at an object, to produce what’s called binocular vision. However, you probably have a dominant eye that your brain tends to favor for “sighting”. Therefore, in monovision, one eye does more work (sighting) than the other. If one of your eyes is set for distance vision and the other is set for near vision, the distance eye will do most of the work when looking at objects in the distance, and the near vision eye will do most of the work when looking at objects close by. To perform this surgical enhancement, doctors typically use procedure: LASIK, the famous name in eye surgery.
Some LASIK surgeons will produce monovision in their presbyopic patients by purposely leaving the non-dominant eye slightly nearsighted so that these patients can see up close without glasses. It’s better to try monovision with contact lenses or trial lenses in the doctor’s office first to be sure you can adapt. With the advancements in customized technology, eligible patients can receive better corrected vision with a slighter chance of side effects. As with all surgical procedures, there is a learning curve for surgeons.
Scleral expansion bands
The surgeon inserts four plastic segments made out of PMMA just below the surface of the scleral, which increases the distance between the muscles that focus the lens and the lens itself. Researchers think the extra distance augments the tension of the muscle, thus allowing it to do a better job of focusing the lens. Resulting from early phase clinical trials involved five patients, all of whom were able to read newspaper print after scleral expansion bands were inserted. Overall, some eyes that have received the implants show improvement, and some do not.