Why You Need Reading Glasses at Age 40

If you’ve reached the ripe young age of 40 then odds are you have trouble with your vision, specifically your near vision. You may even believe you brought this on yourself – maybe your mother was right when she said not to sit so close to the T.V. What has actually happened is that you have just joined about 135 Million other Americans in the Over 40 Club and your blurry near vision has nothing to do with your bad habits.

You have Presbyopia!

Presbyopia is actually blurry near vision due to a natural decrease in your eyes ability to focus. That’s right, it’s normal – it happens to everyone about age 40. Some have defined presbyopia as the shortening of the arms that prevent you from holding an object far enough away to be read. While this makes great comedy, it’s not true. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. Wives tales Would have you believe that wearing glasses make sit worse, the explanation is really simple.

Our eyes have a crystalline lens that is responsible for focusing your vision between mere objects and distant ones. When you are looking for a way to lens in your eye is relaxed, but when you look at something nearby, like a flower the lens flexes to focus on the flower. When you’re young, the lens is very flexible and active – it can focus on a distant Mountain, then seconds later read a roadmap held 4 inches from your nose. As you age the lens gets a little flicker around the middle and doesn’t like to flexes much.

Because of these changes the lens becomes unable to flex like when we were younger to focus on nearby objects. By age 40 that lens is so fat and lazy it won’t even help out when we’re trying to read the newspaper or see our watch. Objects at 40 centimeters, our usual reading distance, become blurry.

Even though this process continues through our life, it’s at 40 that we notice the change because we no longer do the nearby that we used to do. New lenses, such as glasses or contacts must be used to focus our near vision.

Americans today have many options to overcome this obstacle. In addition to the traditional bifocal or reading glass options we also have progressive lenses, which are no-line bifocals, there are a variety of bifocal contact lenses, there are implantable lenses, which are surgically inserted in place of a person’s natural lens by an ophthalmologist. Monovision LASIK is also another option for correction. For more details about the latest technological advances in optometry contact your local eye doctor.