What is Presbyopia?

The Inevitable Condition - How to fix it?

Presbyopia is a natural condition that occurs in all humans. It consists of the loss of the eye’s capacity to accommodate or focus to objects up close. The effect of accommodation happens via the change of curvature of the natural lens inside the eye. With age, the natural lens starts to lose its elasticity and becomes harder with time. For practical purposes, presbyopia usually starts at age 40 and keeps progressing until later in life. Typically, an initial symptom of presbyopia is when you begin to push away objects further from you so that you focus in on them better. People with good natural distance vision suddenly need glasses to read and to focus at near and most of the times, readers at local pharmacies are purchased to overcome the loss of near vision. People with nearsightedness, on the contrary, will keep using glasses for distance and may take off their glasses to read. Since the conditions (nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism) vary, the initial time of visual symptoms related to presbyopia and its severity may differ from person to person. As presbyopia advances, one becomes more dependent on glasses. An alternative to the use of glasses can be the use of contact lenses, and more recently, refractive surgery has emerged for the management of presbyopia.