Hyperopia, Myopia, and Presbyopia: What exactly are they?
As is the case with pretty much any medical treatments, you will encounter lots of interesting terminology when it comes to your eyes.
So, while medical terms such as myopia, hyperopia and presbyopia are perfectly fine for highly trained and qualified eye care professionals like ourselves to use, we recognise that not everyone is an eye care professional.
That’s exactly the reason why we see it as part of our role to explain each of these eye conditions using simple, everyday language: because in doing so, you will know exactly what condition affects you and what your treatment options are.
Hyperopia
This is the medical term for what is more commonly known “far sightedness”, a very common eye condition that affects approximately 1 in 5 people.
With hyperopia, distant objects may appear more clearly than those that are close up. The reason for this is that as a “refractive error”, the shape of the eye prevents light from focusing on the retina. Essentially, what this means is that the eyeball is too short, preventing incoming light from focusing directly on the retina.
Hyperopia can be 100% corrected in approximately 7 minutes via LASIK laser eye surgery: the most commonly performed laser eye surgery procedure in the world. And that means your glasses or contact lenses can become a thing of the past forever!
Myopia
Myopia is the opposite of hyperopia and results in “near sightedness” or “short sightedness. In effect then it causes distant objects to appear blurred, while close up objects appear in full focus.
It is estimated that up to 1 in 3 people in the USA suffer from this condition which, can be caused by the cornea and / or the lens of the eye being too curved for the length of the eyeball. The result is that he eye doesn’t bend or refract light properly to a single focus, which means that objects held close to you will look clear, whilst distant objects appear blurred.
As with hyperopia above, myopia can also be 100% corrected through LASIK laser eye surgery – meaning no more glasses, just perfect 20/20 vision!
Presbyopia
Presbyopia means ‘ageing of the eye’ and is a condition that will affect almost everyone eventually, regardless of whether you have had laser eye surgery or not and regardless of whether you have previously had perfect vision all your life .
As an age-related focus dysfunction that results in the gradual loss of near vision in people over the age of 40, it usually becomes very noticeable once people are in their mid to late forties.
With Presbyopia, reading small print becomes a real challenge and fonts become easier to read the further away you move the reading material from the eyes! The reason for this is that the lens of the eye can no longer change shape easily to ‘accommodate’ near vision, so in response we simply compensate for this by moving the object further away.