The prevalence of myopia — or nearsightedness — in the United States and around the world is eye-opening. Nearly one-third of the global population has myopia and this number is expected to rise to 50% by 2050. In the US, the prevalence of myopia has nearly doubled over the last three decades and now impacts 42% of the population.
If you or your child figure among these numbers, Dr. Curtis Frank and the team here at Vision and Ortho-K Center want you to know that there are solutions. Through orthokeratology, or Ortho-K, we can better manage myopia, allowing you to avoid surgery and/or long-term use of glasses.
Here’s a closer look at how Ortho-K works.
Understanding myopia
To better illustrate why Ortho-K works so well, it’s important to fully understand what we’re up against when it comes to myopia.
With myopia, your ability to see things close to you is fine, but you’re unable to focus well on objects at a distance. This is due to refractive error in your eyes that causes light to focus in front of your retina rather than directly on it, leaving you with blurry distance vision. The reason for this misfocus typically stems from the shape of your cornea and the length of your eye. What glasses, contacts, or Ortho-K lenses do, is focus the light squarely on your macula, is the part of your retina where you see clearly with.
How Ortho-K works
Ortho-K is a technique where we reshape of flatten your cornea overnight using custom made rigid gas-permeable contact lenses.
Your cornea is a malleable. We flatten your cornea so that the light focuses on your retina, as it would if you are wearing other forms of correction. But Ortho-K lenses do not fix your peripheral corneal vision and this slows the progression of myopia. If you wear these lenses, the rate of progression of myopia in children, decreases significantly.
Getting your Ortho-K lenses
There’s no uniform size when it comes to Ortho-K lenses, and we customize the lenses for each of our clients. We start by mapping and measuring the surface of your cornea using a corneal topographer.
Once we have this information, we design lenses that will provide you with the best vision possible. Most people achieve 20/20 vision with Ortho-K lenses, comparable to glasses and contacts.
Ortho-K and kids
Children between the ages of 7 and their mid-20's tend to increase yearly in the amount of myopia that they have.
Hundreds of studies found that Ortho-K lenses slowed myopic progression in children. On average studies show that Ortho-K lenses slow progression by 40 to 60%.
If you’d like to learn more about Ortho-K and whether this approach to myopia control is right for you or your child, contact our office in Boston, Massachusetts, to set up a consultation.
