When eyes age – presbyopia (presbyopia, presbyopia farsightedness) and cataracts
Presbyopia, contrary to its name, does not appear at all in old people. As early as age 35, our eyesight, regardless of previously diagnosed defects, begins to deteriorate. Presbyopia is most often diagnosed just after our 40th birthday, and is most severe when we are 40-55 years old. Around the age of 60 (some believe between 65 and 70) the process comes to a halt.
We have no control over the physiological changes going on in our eyes. The progressive stiffening of the lens and the weakening accommodative ability of the eye are due to the fact that the accommodative muscles are getting weaker and weaker, as this is the result of natural wear and tear on our body.
As our eyes age we begin to experience symptoms such as:
- Inability to read the text closely – the smaller the letters, the greater the trouble,
- Headache and visual fatigue when looking at something up close and trying to sharpen your vision by squinting,
- Problems with visual accommodation in the so-called. The gray hour (when dusk falls or just after it falls).
People struggling with presbyopia have a choice:
- correction with progressive glasses (the change of the corrective value on the surface of the lens is carried out not by leaps and bounds, but smoothly: the upper part of the lens is used to see objects far away, lower its power increases in such a way as to see intermediate distances sharply, that is, from a few meters to a few tens of centimeters),
- correction with multifocal (multifocal) contact lenses – the period of adaptation varies from patient to patient,
- monovision (each eye undergoes a different correction to prepare one eye for long-distance vision and the other for near-distance vision) with contact lenses, through correction with an ophthalmic laser or intraocular lens implants.
Opacification of the lens of the eye that occurs with age and is associated with aging and accompanying metabolic disorders is referred to as senile cataract. It appears around 50. year of age and may initially be unnoticeable to the patient – especially if he or she already has some visual impairment. Over time, symptoms such as:
- Deterioration of distance vision,
- problem with perception and color discrimination,
- Better vision on cloudy days,
- Seeing objects “as through a dirty glass.”
- Deterioration of self-care due to visual impairment.
The only effective way to eliminate senile cataracts is through cataract removal surgery, which is surgery to remove the cloudy lens and implant an artificial lens. This removal can be done by phacoemulsification or femtoemulsification – you can read more about both methods here. The cataract removal procedure is not complicated, and during the procedure you can also get rid of the vision defect. How is this possible? All you need to do is to choose the implantation of lenses from the group of PREMIUMwhich, in addition to the spherical defect (short/long-sightedness), will also compensate for the non-spherical defect (astigmatism) and remove the cataract during one procedure.
Cataracts cannot be cured pharmacologically!
