Treating Your Eye Problems with Corrective Laser Eye Surgery
Advances in corrective laser eye surgeries continue to expand the range of eye conditions that can be treated and cured. LASIK and custom LASIK are the surgical procedures that we use at King LASIK to treat three very common problems with vision clarity. These three conditions are myopia, hyperopia, and astigmatism, and they represent a huge proportion of the more than one million new corrective laser surgery procedures performed each year in the United States. If you have one of these conditions and are interested in understanding the potential benefits from LASIK in more detail, you should learn about these common problems.
Myopia, aka Nearsightedness
If you are nearsighted, too much curvature in the cornea or abnormal eyeball shape makes far-away objects blurry. During LASIK, the surgeon uses a laser to flatten the central part of the cornea and correct this focusing issue. Improved focusing leads to much clearer distance vision.
The prevalence of myopia in populations varies depending on age, race, ethnicity, occupation, and a number of other variables. A number of studies into eye conditions suggest that between 40% and 55% of adults in countries with advanced economies – most of Europe and urban centers across the Americas and East Asia – are myopic.
Many have argued that doing more near-sight work leads to myopia, but however it is caused, many people with this condition are good candidates for LASIK eye surgery.
Hyperopia, aka Farsightedness
Between 10 and 25 percent of people in the United States have hyperopia, second in prevalence only to myopia. Blurry close-up vision and slightly blurred long-vision are caused by an overly flat cornea and problems with refracting and focusing light effectively. A LASIK surgeon uses a laser to increase the steepness of the cornea’s curvature and correct the refractive error. Close vision is much clearer afterwards.
Assuming the proper conditions, it’s possible for LASIK to completely correct many people’s hyperopia for years of clear vision.
Astigmatism
Astigmatism involves blurry vision due to uneven curvature of the cornea (as opposed to just overly convex or concave curvature in the case of the above two conditions). While corrective lenses can be custom designed to help, LASIK is more effective because it can fix the shape of the cornea eliminating the need for corrective lenses.
It is estimated that around 90 percent of all people have a small degree of astigmatism, but studies suggest that somewhere around 33% of people across the globe have vision-impacting astigmatism.
In the case of each of these very common eye conditions, as long as a patient is a good candidate for laser vision correction, they should be able to experience a remarkable improvement of their vision after corrective laser eye surgery.