Laser eye surgery with a reading problem
Are you thinking about a treatment to no longer need glasses or contact lenses? Then you probably immediately think of laser eye surgery. This is the most well-known form of spectacle replacement surgery. But why is it not the most ideal solution to correct a reading problem with laser eye surgery? We are happy to explain it to you.
How does an eye defect occur?
First of all, it is good to know how an eye defect occurs. This is because it can have several causes. You may have a plus strength, a minus strength, a cylinder deviation and/or a reading problem.
Plus and minus strength
A nearsighted eye (myopia, minus power) sees better up close than far away. With nearsightedness, your eyeball is slightly longer and/or your cornea is steeper than it should be. This means that the light falls in front of the retina. Far away, a blurred image is created. This eye condition often occurs during puberty and can be hereditary. About a quarter of the population suffers from myopia or nearsightedness.
If you suffer from farsightedness (hyperopia, plus power), your cornea is too flat or your eyeball is too short. The light falls behind your retina, creating a blurry image. Your eye lens can partially compensate for this deviation by zooming in and out, called accommodation. This compensation works mainly for images that come from afar; close-up becomes more difficult.
With farsightedness, you often have trouble reading or get headaches more quickly.
Astigmatism
With astigmatism, the eyeball shape is not perfectly round. The cornea at the front of your eye has an oval shape, like a rugby ball, which causes the light to refract in different directions. Your eye lens cannot bundle all the rays on the retina at the back of your eye. Two focal points are created, each with its own strength. The difference between these two strengths is called cylinder.Astigmatism also occurs if you are farsighted or nearsighted. The deviation often occurs in your first years of life.
Reading problem
With a reading problem, we also commonly refer to it as a plus strength, but this is a different plus strength than with hyperopia. With a reading problem, the strength is not caused by an eye that is too long or too short, but by aging of the natural eye lens. We also call this presbyopia. To see sharply up close, our eye lens becomes round. And for distance, it becomes flat again. We call this accommodation. As we get older, the natural eye lens also ages and becomes stiffer. This causes your eye lens to have difficulty accommodating. As a result, you notice that you hold your reading material further and further away from you, and eventually reading glasses or reading strength becomes inevitable.
How do you correct a reading problem?
With laser eye surgery, we only adjust the shape of the cornea. The lens is located further in the eye. Behind the iris. After laser eye surgery, the natural lens is still exactly as it was before the treatment and continues to age. The correction that you then apply to the cornea is ultimately no longer sufficient to see clearly up close. Just like you need new reading glasses with a higher prescription at some point.
In an aging eye, the natural lens is the only part that can still change and thus influence the strength. With a ReplaceLens treatment, we replace the natural lens with a high-quality artificial lens. After this treatment, there are no more parts of the eye that change the strength. This makes a ReplaceLens treatment a one-time and permanent correction.
Want to learn more about the ReplaceLens treatment? Click here .
