Colorado Presbyopia Surgery

If you are reading this page while wearing reading glasses, it is most likely you, like hundreds of thousands of other people in the metro-Denver area, have a condition known as presbyopia.

Presbyopia is the inability to focus on near objects, requiring you to wear reading glasses or bifocals. Eye doctors disagree about what causes it; most believe it's caused either by stiffening of the eye's lens, continued growth of the lens or atrophy of the muscles controlling the lens.

One way the Colorado eyecare professionals at InSight Lasik deal with presbyopia is by producing monovision. Normally, both your eyes work together equally when you look at an object. This is called binocular vision. However, you probably have a dominant eye that your brain tends to favor for "sighting" (most right-handed people are right-eye dominant, for example). Contact lens fitters often take advantage of this "one-eye dominance" to produce monovision (think of it as the opposite of binocular vision) with the contacts: they fit one eye for distance vision (typically the dominant eye) and one for near vision.

Some LASIK surgeons will produce monovision in their presbyopic patients by purposely leaving the non-dominant eye slightly nearsighted so that these patients can see up close without glasses (out of one eye). Drs. Jackson and Miller and the Colorado surgeons who perform presbyopia surgery at InSight LASIK suggest you try monovision with contact lenses before presbyopia surgery to be sure you can adapt. We offer this option to all of our patients considering monovision.

If you are in your mid-forties and have mild myopia (up to -3.00), you probably have discovered that it is easier to focus up close and read without your distance glasses. If you have PRK or LASIK, your distance vision will be corrected, but you may find it more comfortable, or necessary, to wear reading glasses for comfort up close. This is because no type of vision correction surgery can eliminate or reverse presbyopia, which is a part of the natural aging process of the eye. Remember presbyopia surgery, like all surgery, carries risk. If you are considering presbyopia surgery, know that the doctors at InSight LASIK would be happy to meet with you to discuss your case.