New Lenses Offer Cataract Patients Clearer Future
You’re reading and you notice 3’s look like 8’s or vice versa. When driving, you find yourself needing to be closer to road signs to make the words out clearly. The world just starts to look a little hazy.
But instead of needing new lenses for your glasses, it could be your eyes themselves that need new lenses, according to Women’s Health Advisor of Weill Cornell Medical College. Cataracts, which simply refer to the clouding of the eye lens, are among those age related conditions that greet most of us in retirement. Ophthalmologist Calvin Roberts, MD, of Weill Cornell Medical College, notes that most cataracts develop after age 65. More than half of all people 80 and older either have cataracts or have had cataract surgery, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While surgery remains the only option for ridding yourself of serious cataracts, your postoperative world provides a much brighter view than it did for cataract patients even just a few years ago.
“There are no alternatives to surgery, but there are new advances to the restoration process,” says Dr. Roberts. “We have lenses that will allow you to see at a distance as well as read without glasses. There are lenses that can correct astigmatisms. The options have become much-improved in the past couple of years.”
Better lenses
For many years, the intraocular lenses that were used to replace the body’s crystalline lenses clouded by cataracts were made of a harder, more rigid plastic and were designed to give patients renewed clarity in their distance vision. The understanding was that they would simply need reading glasses.