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Blended Vision Laser Surgery

Mel90 Full View v7Laser Blended Vision Treatment – A New Answer for Presbyopia

What is PRESBYOPIA?

As people get older, the lens inside their eye changes and is no longer able to focus the eye on images up close. This condition is called presbyopia. People with this condition may experience eye fatigue when reading in poor light or at the end of the day, have trouble changing their focus from distance to near, or need to constantly change the position of reading materials to find the right focus. This loss of elasticity in the lens becomes evident when near vision starts to get blurry somewhere between the ages of 40 to 50. Nobody is immune from this condition, and unchecked certainly means wearing reading glasses, bifocals or progressives.

What Are the Symptoms of Presbyopia?

Symptoms of presbyopia include:

  • Blurred vision at a normal reading distance.
  • The need to hold reading material at arm’s length.
  • Headaches from doing close work.

Presbyopia can be corrected by wearing reading glasses. Some people have avoided reading glasses for many years, however, through a technique called monovision contact lenses and now blended vision.

What is Monovision?

Monovision is an option for people with presbyopia where the two eyes are adjusted to have slightly different focusing points. One eye will see things close up, the other eye will see things farther away, and the brain will incorporate the visual information from both and filter out any blur. With monovision, the brain usually adjusts within 6-8 weeks to each eye focusing at a different distances. Refractive surgery patients can attain monovision with laser vision correction. The procedure uses a method called blended vision a type of monovision that most people have found easier to adjust to.

How Does Laser Blended Vision Work?

Blended Vision is a LASIK procedure where the excimer laser makes one eye (non-dominant eye) a little nearsighted. Your dominant eye then sees clearly in the distance and the non-dominant eye sees near.

Laser Blended Vision is not just making the non-dominant eye near sighted as monovision. The laser also creates a positive spherical aberration in the center of the eye. This correction makes the image disparity from the two eyes smaller and the brain blends the images together even better that you will not notice which eye you are looking through for distance or near.

Both eyes are usually treated to ensure the best possible balance of vision. The laser reshapes the surface of the cornea just as it is done in conventional laser eye surgery. During conventional laser eye surgery the laser reshapes the cornea so that the power is the same throughout the whole cornea. This is not the case for blended vision as the laser creates different power zones so that parts of the cornea are corrected for distance vision and the other parts for reading vision.

Now is an excellent time to consider blended vision since Lasik Provision has acquired the Zeiss MEL 90 Excimer Laser which is suited for blended vision treatments. Before proceeding with the procedure you will need to be tested to see whether you can see far and near by correcting the dominant eye for the distance and the non-dominant eye for reading. If you can tolerate this disparity in the correction then you will be considered for the procedure.

Laser Blended Vision can be performed on those who had LASIK done before and also on those using readers only to reduce the need to wear reading glasses.