You start to develop presbyopia at the age of 40. This is a natural aging process. Your eyes are one of the organs that will be most affected by age. Presbyopia is the eye condition in which the crystalline lens in your eye starts to get less flexible which makes it hard for you to focus the objects up close. The blame, likely, falls on presbyopia if you have trouble reading the small newspaper print or other text in dim lighting.
One way to deal with the visual frustration of presbyopia is to keep a pair of reading glasses in your pocket all the time for moments when you are struggling to read. As presbyopia keeps on increasing, it becomes very inconvenient to fidget with reading glasses every time you need to read. It is even more inconvenient if you have to use different glasses for distant and near objects.
Luckily, there are various options for people who wear glasses and also for people who wear contact lenses.
Multifocal vs. Monovision
Using multifocal contact lenses is the latest technique to compensate for presbyopia. A multifocal contact lens has multiple zones to correct vision instead of just one which allows both of the eyes to work together helping you to see clearly at both near and distant objects.
Before multifocal lenses, monovision contact lenses were the only way to deal with presbyopia. Monovision involves wearing one prescription lens in one eye for distant vision and another lens for near vision in the other eye. People still use monovision, but it doesn’t allow both the eyes to work together.
Multifocal Designs for reading
Multifocal contact lenses are available in a number of designs. Bifocal multifocal contacts have distant vision correction surrounding the near vision correction at the center. Bifocal contacts also come in a variation in which the distant vision correction in the center with near vision correction surrounding it.
Translating designs, also known as the alternating image, are like mini bifocals with near vision at the bottom and distant vision correction at the top. Alternating image lenses are only available in gas permeable lenses.
Simultaneous image contact lens design has both near and distant vision in front of the pupil at once.
Multifocal contact lenses offer a crisp, sharp vision and provide a perfect substitute for reading glasses. When you shift from the reading glasses to contact lenses, it takes a little time to get used to them. At the beginning of using the lenses, there is an adjustment period in which the brain gets used to a new way of seeing, This mild inconvenience is a small price to pay in exchange for the elimination of the inconvenience of reading glasses.
