It’s possible to improve mild to moderate nearsightedness while you sleep, even though it might sound like one of those fishy come-on ads with messages such as, “Lose Weight While You Dream the Night Away.”
The process, called “orthokeratology,” involves wearing special contact lenses during the night to improve your vision during the day without the use of regular contact lenses, eyeglasses, or any other aid.
Orthokeratology, popularly called ortho-k, uses rigid contact lenses approved for nighttime wear to reshape the cornea. The effect is temporary, so the lenses must be worn almost every night.
The idea has been knocking around since the 1940s, when doctors first discovered that glass contact lenses could reshape the eye. The first real ortho-k design was made in the 1960s, but results were always unpredictable until the advent of computers and better eye measuring instruments. In 2002 the FDA approved a type of corneal reshaping lens for overnight wear, and ortho-k began to take off.
How does it work and how well? Nearsightedness, also called myopia, is caused by improper focus of light rays on the retina. Eyeglasses or regular contact lenses can be worn to correct the focus, or the cornea itself can be reshaped for proper focus by Lasik surgery. Ortho-k reshapes the cornea without surgery, and although the effect is temporary, it is also reversible, unlike Lasik.
Ortho-k lenses reshape the cornea by encouraging cells on the top level of your cornea to move from the center of your eye to the periphery. The lenses are custom-fitted using an instrument that painlessly measures the curvatures of your cornea in about a minute, and the lenses are gas-permeable, so they permit oxygen to reach your eyes during wear, keeping them from drying out and becoming sore.
Ortho-k can reshape the eye and correct for two or three diopters of nearsightedness in two weeks or less. Side effects are painless, but include light halos and glare that never go away for some people.
Of course, patients must follow hygiene recommendations to a “T” to avoid eye infections, as is also the case with ordinary contact lenses.
To reverse the effects of ortho-k, the patient simply stops wearing the corrective lenses. Ortho-k seems to work best for people who don’t want to wear either glasses or contacts during the day but don’t mind wearing them at night. Treatment for both eyes usually costs about $1,200 to $1,500, and about $300 to $500 annually for replacement lenses.
About 50,000 people in the United States are making use of ortho-k technology. Overall, nearsightedness affects about one-quarter of the American population.
© 2009 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
|
