What type of eye surgery is available for people who wear progressive glasses?

Question

Mazin Yaldo, MD · Answer

If you wear progressive lenses, you are likely over 40 and have presbyopia,
the aging of the lens inside the eyes that everyone gets as they get
older.  This causes difficulty with
close vision.  In addition to this,
you have some type of refractive error such as nearsightedness (myopia),
farsightedness (hyperopia) and/or astigmatism, which can affect both your far
and your near vision.

There are several good ways to address all these troubles with
surgery.  LASIK or other forms of
laser vision correction (LASEK, PRK, epi-LASIK) can be used to give
“monovision,” where one eye sees clearly for far, and the other eye is left
slightly nearsighted to allow for close vision.  Most, but not all people adapt well to this type of
vision and either don’t need any glasses at all, or will very rarely use
glasses to fine tune the vision in certain situations.  Monovision can usually be simulated
with contact lenses prior to surgery so that you can determine if you will
adapt to it well.

Another very different option is called Refractive Lens Exchange
(RLE).  This procedure involves the
removal of the natural lens inside the eye, and replacement with an artificial
lens implant.  These lens implants
can be “multifocal”—think of it as replacing the lenses inside your eyes with
bifocals or progressive lenses. 
This procedure works quite well, but is not perfect in that there may be
some night side effects, and/or some zones of near vision that are not in
focus.  Some patients having RLE
may still need some glasses now and then for certain near tasks.  RLE is very similar to cataract
surgery, which is treatment for the clouding of the natural lens as people get into
their 60’s and 70’s.  Having RLE
will eliminate your future need for cataract surgery.

Hope this helps.

Dante Buonsanti, MD · Answer

it depends on age, but mainly if you are in you late forties or more, you could be a candidate for trifocal, extended depth, or multifocal intraocular lens. Anything else would only be temporal.

Martin L. Fox, MD · Answer

There is no specific laser surgery that can produce a multifocal effect. Laser correct can be modified to create a mono vision effect by leave get the non dominant eye undercorrected or there is the option of full correction with lasik followed by a presbyopia correcting inlay which should find FDA approval next year. Another option would be to consider the option of so- called clear lens exchange surgery. This is a scenario where the natural crystalline lens is removed prior to actual cararact formation with implantation of a multifocal lens implant.

What type of eye surgery is available for people who wear progressive glasses?

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What type of eye surgery is available for people who wear progressive glasses?

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