Even if you've had perfect vision all your life, you may have difficulty reading small print as you approach your senior years. The first sign is when you need to hold a menu or food label farther away so you can see it better. The cause of this problem is often presbyopia, a common eye condition that develops with age and gradually gets worse. The usual remedy is to buy reading glasses if your far vision is still good. Reading glasses allow you to read small print up close, but they can be annoying when you aren't used to wearing glasses. Contact lenses could be a better choice. Here's how contacts help with presbyopia.

Why Contacts Are Convenient

If you wear reading glasses to correct for your presbyopia, you have to put them on and take them off all day. They are great for reading print material, but they distort your far vision. So unless you wear them on a chain around your neck, you'll probably constantly misplace your glasses. If you need reading glasses for work, then it can be annoying to constantly put them on and off. Contacts eliminate this problem because you put them in once and wear them all day. You'll forget you're wearing them. You won't have to put up with the annoyance of wearing glasses and constantly misplacing them.

How Contacts Correct Presbyopia

Contacts for presbyopia work in a way that's similar to bifocal glasses. Part of the lens is intended for far vision while the other is made to correct near vision. These are called multifocal lenses. Multifocal lenses are made in a couple of different ways. The top portion may be devoted to far vision so you see clearly far away when you look straight ahead. Then, the lower part is for reading when you lower your eyes to look at a newspaper or menu. There is another type of multifocal lens that is made differently. It has a circular area that corrects for near vision when you look straight ahead. It is surrounded by a larger circular area for your far vision. Your eyes will adapt to the lenses so you can switch from near to far vision and see clearly all the time. Your eye doctor will decide which type of lens is best based on your degree of vision loss and your lifestyle.

Your eye doctor may even try a completely different approach and recommend monovision lenses instead. With these, you wear a lens for far vision in one eye and a lens for near vision in the other eye. It may sound difficult to adjust to, but your brain and eyes adapt automatically to give you clear vision whether you're reading close up or far away.

Contacts could be the perfect solution for improving your near vision when reading glasses are too bothersome for you. If you lead an active lifestyle or participate in sports, contacts are even more beneficial since you won't have to worry about losing or damaging your glasses when you're on the go.

For more information on presbyopia and contacts, visit a site such as http://www.the-eye-center.com.