Myopia Management

Myopia (short or nearsightedness) is the single most common cause of visual impairment in the world. Myopia typically starts at childhood and persists throughout the entire life. Myopia is most often corrected with the use of prescription glasses and, for most people, that is all the management they need; but did you know that there are ways to contol and slow down myopia progression? There are three main waysto slow down myopia progression and in this article we will briefly go over them for you so you have a better understanding of the solutions out there. 

There's a couple things you should keep in mind while you read this article. First, myopia control is to slow down the progression, not to stop it. Second, myopia control is only effective when myopia is progressing (typically during childhood).

The first and most common way of slowing down myopia is called Orthokeratology or Ortho-K. This is a procedure where the patient wears hard (rigid and gas-permeable) contact lenses overnight and remove them during the day. There is a bonus “side-effect” of this method; due to how the contact lens reshapes the cornea (front of the eye) you can actually see even without corrective lenses when you remove the contacts in the morning.

The second method uses low-dose atropine. Atropine 1% is often used to dilate pupils for days. Research has shown that when you use a very low dose atropine (0.03% to 0.01%), you get none of the dilation effects and you can a slow down of myopia progression.

The last method  is to wear multi focal corrective lenses or multi focal contact lenses. While it sounds great in concept because you don't have to use eyedrops or wear hard contacts overnight, these multifocal corrections tend to make the vision a little blurry and patietns can have difficulty seeing during the day. However, this varies between person to person so the effect on vision may be minimal for some people.