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Are You Suffering from Presbyopia?

Presbyopia is usually found in people who are 40 years of age. People with presbyopia experience blurred vision of near objects. The exact cause of presbyopia is not known yet and this condition is considered as a natural part of our aging process. The flexibility of the natural crystalline lens deteriorates in individuals suffering from presbyopia. This condition may feel to you as if it suddenly happened, but actually the loss of lens flexibility is a gradual process that takes years to become noticeable. Presbyopia is not considered a disease and at the moment does not have a preventive treatment. The major symptoms of presbyopia include blurred vision, strains after reading for a long time and feeling tired or having a headache after reading in low-light environments.

Presbyopia cannot be cured and it is normally treated using bifocals or reading glasses. Surgery is another permanent solution for treating presbyopia. Conductive Keratoplasty, Refractive Lens Exchange and Monovision or Blended vision surgery are the three top of the line types of surgery offered for presbyopia at the Horizon Eye Specialists and LASIK Center.

Conductive Keratoplasty (CK) is a surgical procedure that uses cornea reshaping to correct presbyopia. At Horizon, CK is used to increase the corneal curvature which in turn improves the patient’s eyesight. Conductive Keratoplasty is conducted using a tiny probe. The probe delivers radiofrequency energy onto the cornea which shrinks as a result. The energy is applied to the center of the cornea in the pattern of a ring. Shrinking of the corneal center leads to a steeper curve that that helps to better refract light.

Monovision surgery, which is not performed with laser, is another good option for the correction of presbyopia. In a Monovision procedure, our Phoenix-based team of experience eye surgeons will optimize one eye’s for distance vision and the other eye will be corrected for near vision. Monovision can be performed on patients who are wearing contact lenses or those who had undergone refractive surgery in the past. This surgical procedure eliminates the need of reading glasses with different focal lengths for the eyes as the surgery enables each eye of the patient to focus on objects at different focal lengths. Monovision procedure, which is also known as Nearvision conductive keratoplasty, can be done on only one eye which is usually the non-dominant eye. The “dominant eye” is the eye which will see objects from a distance.

At Horizon Eye Specialist and LASIK Center, our surgeons may recommend you a third way to correct presbyopia, which is called Refractive Lens Exchange. In this procedure, a tiny incision is created towards the edge of the cornea. Our doctors will insert a probe through this incision and the damaged lens will be gently broken to small pieces and sucked out. In place of natural lens, our ophthalmologists will insert an advanced multifocal intraocular lens. The entire procedure will take only twenty to twenty five minutes to complete. Refractive lens exchange provides patients with quick recovery of vision.

Please contact our office to schedule a private consultation with one of our eye experts. We will be able to examine your eyes and offer you a treatment that best suits your condition.