Better vision for seniors

All of a sudden, you might have trouble pushing a thread through the eye of the needle or you may have to hold your newspaper far away from your face so that you can read it. These are the first signs of advanced age vision problems. It is a normal process and no cause for concern. After all, good glasses and progressive lenses are now available to ensure that you can enjoy eagle’s eye vision.

It begins somewhere between the age of 40 and 50: The lens and the ring muscle inside your eyes might lose elasticity. The eye is no longer able to automatically adjust and zoom in on different distances, a process enabled by what experts call accommodation. It makes the lens of the eye bend to adjust to the distances.

However, if this process does not work as nature intended, this causes problems with close-up vision. If the lens maintains a flat shape when looking at objects that are close-by, its refractory force is significantly impaired. Consequently, light beams that penetrate the eye from near-by are bundled behind the retina and deliver a blurred image.

Farsighted people may encounter this problem much sooner. Hyperopic people have excellent long range vision, but do have problems seeing things that are close-up. The reason: The eyeball is too short and the incoming rays of light are not accurately depicted on the retina.

Short sighted people might actually see things in their immediate range of vision better without glasses than they do with them. Taking your glasses on and off constantly, though, can be quite annoying. Consequently, the best solution – regardless of whether you had normal vision before, or were already short or farsighted is a pair of customised glasses.

Those who had normal vision before will initially only need reading glasses. However, age driven vision problems do amplify as the years progress. Many will soon also need something to correct their medium range vision.
In such cases, glasses with progressive lenses are the perfect solution, as they accommodate the zones for different vision distances infinitely – without a separating ocular edge and with infinite transitions. The number one benefit of progressive lenses is that the eye can jump from one image to the next and zoom in sharply, regardless of whether an object is off in the distance or nearby.

Today, special career glasses with expanded visual zones for medium range and close up distances are available for users who spend a lot of time working on computers. The special progressive addition lens is optimally aligned with the distance between user and screen. The quality level of the lenses is of particular importance for progressive glasses. If they do not meet high quality standards, getting used to these glasses can be extremely difficult.

You may well be wondering if the traditional sight test, i.e. subjective refraction, is necessary at all, if it leads to inaccuracies. The answer is yes. The optician must be able to record your personal reaction to the various lenses he or she inserts in front of your eyes. Just as importantly, subjective refraction also tests how your eyes interact and how they will see with your new spectacles.

However, there are ophthalmic instruments such as the ZEISS i.Profiler ^plus which can be used to perform objective refraction beforehand. It uses wavefront technology to analyze the vision profile of each eye on the basis of 1,500 measuring points and generates a "map" of the eyes’ retinas. No active collaboration of the patient is required. All he or she needs to do is look into the i.Profiler®plus for a short time. This is a preparatory measurement, the results of which are then refined by the optician in the subsequent subjective refraction procedure.

And that is not all: as the ZEISS i.Profile ^plus measures visual performance with a contracted pupil (in bright light) and a dilated pupil (in poor light or at night), it is possible to determine whether the patient's night vision is poorer than his or her daytime vision (And suddenly you see more). The optician can use this information to incorporate the appropriate optimisations in the lenses. A major benefit of this procedure is that the time required for the eye sight may be reduced.