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Treatment of Myopia

Nearsightedness may be corrected with glasses, contact lenses or refractive surgery. Depending on your vision problem, you may need to wear your glasses or contact lenses all the time, or only when you need distance vision, like driving, seeing a chalkboard or watching a movie. If you're nearsighted, your prescription is a negative number. The higher the numeral, the stronger your lenses will be.

A negative (minus) powered lens is placed in front of the eye to reduce its effective power, thereby bringing light to a focus ON the retina.

Note -

1. A highly short sighted person is prone to develop retinal damage leading to a retinal detachment and possibly blindness. Hence it is advisable for such a person to have a periodic retinal check up as early diagnosis can prevent such a detachment from occurring.

2. The course of myopia, often hereditary, is not influenced by diet, computer use, reading habits, the use or non-use of glasses or any factor in the patient's or the surgeon's control.

3. Of late, there have been several advances in the surgical treatment of myopia (please see the section on LASIK and ZYOPTIX. 

Refractive surgery can reduce or even eliminate your need for glasses or contacts. The most common procedures are performed with an excimer laser. In photorefractive keratectomy, or PRK, the laser removes a layer of corneal tissue, which flattens the cornea and allows light rays to focus closer to or even on the retina. In laser-assisted in situ keratomileusis (LASIK) — the most common refractive procedure — a flap is cut through the top of the cornea, a laser removes some corneal tissue, and then the flap is dropped back into place.

Then there's orthokeratology, a non-surgical procedure where you wear special contact lenses that slowly reshape the cornea over time to correct your myopia. When the lenses are removed, the cornea temporarily retains the new shape, so you can see clearly without the lenses.

WHAT IS LASIK/ZYOPTIX?

Older refractive surgeries like PRK and RK were unreliable, could correct only a limited range of powers and were associated with complications such as recurrence of power, pain, hazy vision, weakening of the eyeball, etc. and have now become obsolete. 

LASIK is an acronym for Laser-Assisted In Sito Keratomileusis. The LASIK procedure, which was created to reduce a persons need for contact lenses or glasses, is relatively painless and quick, but a serious surgical procedure nonetheless. The surgery is performed by a highly specialized and trained laser eye surgeon.

LASIK (Laser in situ keratomileusis) is the current gold standard for refractive surgery as it addresses these problems successfully. A microkeratome is used to lift a thin flap of the cornea, permitting the excimer laser to gently reshape the middle layers, thereby correcting the refractive error. The flap is then replaced.  

Done on an out-patient basis, this painless procedure (no injections or bandages) takes less than 10 minutes using less than a minute of laser energy. Visual recovery is quick and the patient can go home immediately. The results are stable and the correction usually lasts for a lifetime. More than a million procedures have been performed all over the world. 

Eligibility: patients above 18 years of age with stable short sight (-1 to -18), long sight (+1 to +6) and astigmatism (0.5 to 6) are eligible for the procedure. Complete elimination of glasses may not result in all patients. Considerable reduction in dependence on glasses is a more realistic goal. Presbyopia (age related reading glasses) cannot be corrected.

 Equipment: the latest 4th generation integrated workstation from Bausch & Lomb (Germany), the world leaders in this technology, is used and is the first of its kind in Karnataka. It features a ceramic laser head to provide stable energy and accurate correction, aided by the Orbscan and active eye tracking software to enhance precision and safety. The microkeratome used is the Hansatome, considered to be the world’s safest and most precise. The system is topography-linked (Zyoptix with Aberrometer) for customized ablation in complicated cases. As both the setup and the disposables used are expensive, the procedure is costly.