Eyesight @ 50+ / progressives

[Mogul]

I didn't get on too well with my first pair of progressives.

A pair of Zeiss Precision Superbs, that I believe were supposed to cover distance, intermed. & near were quickly replaced with a pair of Zeiss Digitals - that I believe reduced/ignored the near add and I got on much better with them for a couple of years.

Fast forward to now and I'm beginning to see the limitation of one prescription to cover all scenarios (esp. office work).

Perhaps it's time to go with a true 'Occupational' prescription for computer work and around the house, and a separate prescription for other daily use incl. outside & driving.

I have the Duravision Platinum coatings on my current Zeiss Digitals and TBH, I've not been blown away with the astigmatism correction, esp. during night driving.

Has anyone tried the Zeiss DriveSafe progressives, and have you gone for a 3-way distance/intermed/near or a 2-way distance/intermeds for the road/dashboard?

Other brands are of course available and I had thought that limiting my research to Zeiss would simplify things, but there are so many different products it is hard to compare so I can see how one might end up with multiple pairs/prescriptions, but that could get expensive...

And what on earth is 'Mesh Technology' (not Zeiss, afaik)?

[arcturus]

I'm now 60 but have been wearing glasses since I was 12 and varifocals (or progressives in the new lingo) for about 12 years now. I have always had Essilor lenses (I just go with what my optician says) and have always been super pleased with them. I currently have the X series lenses and they are superb. I used to have a separate pair of occupational glasses but these are totally unnecessary for me now. The X series have a very smooth transition between the zones and I have got used to just moving my head very slightly up or down to optimise my vision. Peripheral vision is also very good. They are not cheap (i think I paid about £300 for each lens) but they are, in my view, definitely worth it.

FYI, I am about -3 in both eyes with some astigmatism as well. I also have very good visual acuity, meaning that when my vision is corrected I can see more detail and read at longer distances than most people. So I can spot when the optician changes my lens by 1/4 diopter when most people wouldn't notice the difference. In other words I am very critical of my my glasses!!

[Turn7]

Late 50s, been wearing specs since 12.

As above, currently wearing Essilor X series.

Pricey but worth it.

I have a pair of “office” lens specs that are essentially screen and slightly longer lens for working at the pc.

Also have a pair of closeup single vision for when I’m upside down in a cupboard and can’t get vari’s to
Focus.

[oddman]

Not answering the OP directly but for others getting by with supermarket or Amazon readers

Always had perfect vision until mid 40s when presbyopia began to creep in (noticed holding book at arms length and unable to tie on fishing flies)

I got by for 10 years using supermarket readers and bifocal sunglasses for fishing. Finally went to optician when I noticed TV viewing and dashboard wasn't focussed and either with or without specs. Got told off by optician- apparently men with previously good vision are the worst for delaying the visit.

Optician advised spending on decent lenses as the variofocal element is wider and easier to use in the better lenses. They were an absolute game changer and I adapted really well. Wish I'd done it years ago.

Don't be like me. Get yourself assessed and a proper pair of specs. If you're going varifocal, a good optician will refund if you genuinely can't get on with them but I think it's a case of spend a bit of money and buy right buy once.

[TGCOTF-dewey]

oddman said:

Not answering the OP directly but for others getting by with supermarket or Amazon readers

Always had perfect vision until mid 40s when presbyopia began to creep in (noticed holding book at arms length and unable to tie on fishing flies)

I got by for 10 years using supermarket readers and bifocal sunglasses for fishing. Finally went to optician when I noticed TV viewing and dashboard wasn't focussed and either with or without specs. Got told off by optician- apparently men with previously good vision are the worst for delaying the visit.

Optician advised spending on decent lenses as the variofocal element is wider and easier to use in the better lenses. They were an absolute game changer and I adapted really well. Wish I'd done it years ago.

Don't be like me. Get yourself assessed and a proper pair of specs. If you're going varifocal, a good optician will refund if you genuinely can't get on with them but I think it's a case of spend a bit of money and buy right buy once.

TBH I wish I had held off. My close up vision has deteriorated rapidly with no glasses on, since getting reading glasses.

[Mogul]

Short-sighted since my teens, I used to have excellent near vision. At 50, I got myself a cheap pair of prescription readers (+1.50 Near Add) that can be helpful for laptop use, but I can still read comfortably without them - including in bed, if there is a reasonable light source.

However, whereas I used to be able to tackle something really detailed, like an iPhone repair, I'm finding this harder now, even with the readers on and good light.

Is it possible to maintain excellent near vision at 50+ (with or without correction), or are there other factors (pupils size etc.) that have an impact?

I'm not convinced that wearing specs contributes to further decline in any way and my prescription was effectively stable for 30 years (from mid teens) but once you near 50, things begin to change for a few years and may then stabilise again for a number of years, or so I am led to believe.

Edited by Mogul on Wednesday 16th August 10:14

[lemansky]

TGCOTF-dewey said:

TBH I wish I had held off. My close up vision has deteriorated rapidly with no glasses on, since getting reading glasses.

An oft-repeated fallacy - "my eyes were fine until I started to wear glasses. It must be the glasses that have made my eyes worse."

If you need help with your eyes, get it.
Don't hold off, thinking you might be making things worse, because you won't be.

I'm too lazy to type it all out again, so here's a couple of posts I made (with a previous username) at the start of the Covid lockdown, when a similar discussion was raised in here.

Johnny Raydome said:

You're halfway through your life (if you're lucky) and your eyes aren't as good as they were.

Many, many folks take their eyesight for granted and wonder why they can't read as well as they could 40 years ago.
Yes, I imagine you'd struggle to do anything the same as you did 40 years ago, but seeing/reading doesn't appear to fall in the same category for a lot of people.

I could banzai an army assault course when I was 20. Now? Not so much.
Why should your eyes be any different?

Let's put it into a 'car scenario' seeing as we're here on PH and let's replace 'glasses' with a corrective 'engine additive.'

Your car is 45 years old and it has lost 10% of its engine power. Not only that - it will continue to lose another 5% of its engine power every year, because of worn components, etc.

The situation is - your car is 10% down on its performance. Your garage can prescribe a correction that helps keep your car operating at 100%. Great! You pay for this and go back to normal life.

They ask you to come back in two years for a check up. During this period, your car has naturally lost another 10% of its power, so the garage will have to prescribe a stronger additive that your engine now needs.

Etcetera. Etcetera.

It wasn't the additive that made your engine lose power. It was the engine wearing out, naturally, from the outset. It'll keep deteriorating, regardless of the strength of the additive.
But, to improve the engine performance, the additive strength needs increasing, at regular intervals.

To conclude, it's not glasses that wreck your eyes (unless they've been prescribed and/or dispensed wrong).
Your eyes are always getting worse, accept it. Specs give you the extra power that your eyes are constantly losing and by definition, this power will continue to increase.

Followed by:

Johnny Raydome said:

HTP99 said:

Stuart70 said:

Short sighted - cannot read the registration of the bus coming round the corner.
Long sighted - cannot read the restaurant menu in your hand.

Second one is a sad feature of ageing, well done in getting to 52 - I barely made it to 40 before needing reading glasses.
Good luck in getting the prescription sorted.

I have been short sighted and worn glasses since about the age of 14, only recently at 45 has my prescription seemed to steady out and start to plateau, as being long sighted tends to be an old person thing, could I well end up being long sighted or will I always remain short sighted?

Not intending to look like a wise-ass, nor am I jumping on anyone here (notice how I didn't start this post with 'Nope' ) but there's a little bit of confusion with the terminology here. Bit of time on my hands and the lawns have been cut twice this week.

Long-sightedness is not something that happens to you because you're older.
(Okay, if you're short sighted with a minus prescription and you have your eyes tested aged 45 and the prescription has become slightly less minus, then - technically - you've become slightly more long-sighted, but that isn't really what's being discussed here.)

Plenty of very young kids are long-sighted, some quite heavily. See that kid with the bottle-bottom specs that magnify the size of his eyes? He's long-sighted.

For the sake of keeping things neat, let's assume that same kid keeps the same prescription in his specs until he is in his 40's (highly unlikely, but bear with me). It's at this time of his life that presbyopia starts taking hold. Long-sightedness is not the same thing as presbyopia, although the effects on the person can be roughly similar.

Presbyopia - literally meaning 'old eye' - is the age-related condition that interferes negatively with the eyes' ability to accommodate which is the process of the crystalline lens inside the eye changing its shape to help focus on near objects.
You know the little 'bubble' on the glass of your Rolex Submariner (this is PH, after all) which magnifies the date? The eye has its own version of this - inside your eye is a little gel 'bubble' called a crystalline lens which, controlled by ciliary muscles, can squish up to become fatter with a steeper front curve enabling you to focus on close objects.

As time and age causes a hardening of the gel 'bubble' and a weakening of the muscles that control its shape, it can't squish up quite as fat as it used to. And it gets worse and worse and worse. The result of this i.e. the effect you start to see is that your point of near focus appears to be getting further and further away from you, as time goes on.

Going back to the long-sighted kid with the chunky specs, this process of accommodation has been working fine all of his life until he hits his forties. Now, his ability to focus on near objects (accommodation) is deteriorating (because of presbyopia).

And soon, he will start making jokes about his arms not being long enough to read things.

The point of all this is that you could have been long-sighted since you were born but presbyopia is still going to get you when you hit middle-age.

For anyone who wonders why their optician all-of-a-sudden tells them they need varifocal or bifocal lenses when single vision lenses have been fine for the last 40 years - presbyopia is the reason.

The kid in the example above will likely be advised that varifocal lenses is a good solution - his distance prescription will still be there right in front of his eyes, but just below and out of his line of sight will be an extra boost of plus lens power to help with his near tasks. That boost is called the reading 'add' and is additional to the distance prescription.

It is worth making it clear that presbyopia is going to get you, whether you're long-sighted, short-sighted or neither (emmetropic). It just happens that the posters I quoted above were talking about long-sightedness, so that's what the example kid was made to be.

In HTP99's individual case (always short-sighted but apparently now long-sighted) it is the onset of presbyopia that's doing this to you, not a shift to long-sightedness. You're still short-sighted - you just can't accommodate like you used to be able to (whilst wearing yours specs), so you need a wee boost for your close work.

It also has to be said that everyone's experiences and needs differ enormously. There could be ten posters on this thread who all have identical spectacle prescriptions (again, highly unlikely) and all choose to cope in completely different ways. Varifocals, bifocals, separate pairs of single vision specs, contact lenses, laser surgery, the list goes on.

And the point of saying that is because, when it comes to specs and spectacle prescriptions, one size most definitely does not fit all.

And after typing that little lot out, I reckon the grass might need cutting again.

There are exceptions here and there but the majority of people fall into the bracket where their ability to accommodate starts to wobble from their early 40's and up. Some folks last until their early 50's.
Modern tech prolongs the process, with digital screens being able to be zoomed up, font sizes increased, people taking photos of small print and blowing it up.

The onset of presbyopia and the effect of deterioration it has is so predictable, that we can have a table loosely illustrating a likely set of circumstances.
From Optician Online:



A general guide for Optometrists to not only predict reading adds by age, but to see how the amplitude of accommodation* in a patient gets less effective with age, also. The obvious point here is that these things are age-related.


Sorry, folks. You're getting older and your eyes are getting weaker.
There are different solutions depending on the individual but that's about the size of it.




*amplitude of accommodation is - in a nutshell - a measure of how much power the eye can exert to see objects at increasingly near distances. The onset of presbyopia and its ongoing effects as age/time goes on is clear (unless you have cataracts, in which case it might be slightly hazy).

[oddman]

lemansky said:

TGCOTF-dewey said:

TBH I wish I had held off. My close up vision has deteriorated rapidly with no glasses on, since getting reading glasses.

Comprehensive debunking of this nonsense

Other non-refraction related reasons for seeing an optician in middle age

1) Pressure test - glaucoma can blind you silently - tunnel vision creeps up and before you know it only your central vision left. Treatment is effective and simple
2) Direct visualisation of the retina. This is the only part of the brain that can be seen from the outside world, so the condition of the blood vessels in the retina are a good indicator of the vessels in the brain and reveal damage caused by diabetes, high blood pressure etc.
3) CT retinography - pick up retinal diseases earlier.

[TGCOTF-dewey]

@ Lemansky.

Thing is, I did get glasses when I needed them. After just a couple of months wearing them 8 hours + day at work, my eyesight was then significantly worse when not wearing them.

I went back to the opticians becuase I was worried about underlying issues...of which there were none and my prescription hadn't changed.

So it's not nonsense as oddman suggests.

[Speckle]

I'm 50 and have been wearing varifocals for a few years now. Used to have a prescription pair for general use and then use readers for computer work and reading. Swapping over all the time at work drove me nuts!

My optician then suggested adding a band of higher magnification at the bottom of the lens, effectively pushing the prescription element upwards.

I now use a single pair for everything and they work perfectly. Might not work for everyone of course but, it might be worth having the conversation.

[lemansky]

TGCOTF-dewey said:

@ Lemansky.

Thing is, I did get glasses when I needed them. After just a couple of months wearing them 8 hours + day at work, my eyesight was then significantly worse when not wearing them.

Obviously I don't know your history/prescription etc, but having had this conversation a few thousand times at least, I suspect you were just noticing the benefit of wearing the glasses versus not...

TGCOTF-dewey said:

I went back to the opticians because I was worried about underlying issues...of which there were none and my prescription hadn't changed.

..which is verified by this - your own optician told you there were no underling changes and your prescription was stable. My interpretation of this is that your eyes hadn't got worse. You might think they had but they hadn't (which also proves the oft-repeated fallacy quoted above that wearing glasses makes your eyes worse).

TGCOTF-dewey said:

So it's not nonsense as oddman suggests.

You wouldn't believe the amount of people who are going about their dailies without specs, when they really should be.
Once they start wearing specs and see the benefit of clear vision, it's quite a shock to realise just how bad their eyes really were.

Perhaps 'nonsense' was a bit strong, as it's clearly something you feel you have experienced. But there are reasons behind it and I confess that I do bristle slightly when I hear people trot out the 'my eyes were fine until I started wearing glasses' line.

Most people will come to understand the reasoning behind it if you spend time trying to explain it in a way that's easy to digest (as I hope I have managed to do above).
I still get my fair share of people who seriously resent the fact that their eyes have done 'em over and they've now got to spend money on something they really don't want. And I understand and sympathise. But it's not the glasses that have made their eyes worse.

[TGCOTF-dewey]

lemansky said:

TGCOTF-dewey said:

@ Lemansky.

Thing is, I did get glasses when I needed them. After just a couple of months wearing them 8 hours + day at work, my eyesight was then significantly worse when not wearing them.

Obviously I don't know your history/prescription etc, but having had this conversation a few thousand times at least, I suspect you were just noticing the benefit of wearing the glasses versus not...

TGCOTF-dewey said:

I went back to the opticians because I was worried about underlying issues...of which there were none and my prescription hadn't changed.

..which is verified by this - your own optician told you there were no underling changes and your prescription was stable. My interpretation of this is that your eyes hadn't got worse. You might think they had but they hadn't (which also proves the oft-repeated fallacy quoted above that wearing glasses makes your eyes worse).

TGCOTF-dewey said:

So it's not nonsense as oddman suggests.

You wouldn't believe the amount of people who are going about their dailies without specs, when they really should be.
Once they start wearing specs and see the benefit of clear vision, it's quite a shock to realise just how bad their eyes really were.

Perhaps 'nonsense' was a bit strong, as it's clearly something you feel you have experienced. But there are reasons behind it and I confess that I do bristle slightly when I hear people trot out the 'my eyes were fine until I started wearing glasses' line.

Most people will come to understand the reasoning behind it if you spend time trying to explain it in a way that's easy to digest (as I hope I have managed to do above).
I still get my fair share of people who seriously resent the fact that their eyes have done 'em over and they've now got to spend money on something they really don't want. And I understand and sympathise. But it's not the glasses that have made their eyes worse.

I'd venture that there is an adaptation effect going on.

I'm not totally oblivious to the physiology, having covered the physiology of eyes during my MSc. anatomy, sacadic movement, fatigue effects on critical fusion rates, etc.

When a crew of submarine of submarine comes off patrol they are advised not to drive for a while as their vision has not experienced focusing on infinity for months. Their eyesight is measurably worse.

This is a very real effect.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/505624/

I'd suggest that wearing glasses is similar; my eyes have adapted to glasses. The result is that they lack the resolving power they previously had because they no longer need it due to corrected vision.

[lemansky]

TGCOTF-dewey said:

When a crew of submarine of submarine comes off patrol they are advised not to drive for a while as their vision has not experienced focusing on infinity for months. Their eyesight is measurably worse.

Big problems ahead for current and future generations of kids as myopia (short-sightedness) is on the rise in a big way, all over the world. People glued to their phones/tablets/screens/playing video games for hours at a time, studious kids having hours of homework to do every night. Kids not playing out in the streets and wastelands like they used to.
Myopia control is becoming a big area of interest in optics and for lens manufacturers.

Distance and near vision are separate entities and one shouldn't make the mistake that short-sightedness is inextricably linked to good near vision for life.
Myopes become presbyopic, too.

TGCOTF-dewey said:

I'd suggest that wearing glasses is similar; my eyes have adapted to glasses. The result is that they lack the resolving power they previously had because they no longer need it due to corrected vision.

If you want to put it down to an adaption thing, then who am I to argue? I would aver, however, that your eyes lack the resolving power they used to have because you are presbyopic.
I suspect your own optician would tell you similar.

When you went back to see him/her/them, your optician also confirmed that your refractive ability was the same as when your NV specs were prescribed i.e. they were not lacking the resolving power that you thought they were.
Enjoy this while it lasts, by the way, because it won't.

[Sheepshanks]

Mogul said:

Other brands are of course available and I had thought that limiting my research to Zeiss would simplify things, but there are so many different products it is hard to compare....

That really is a bit of a nightmare. The well-known brands each seem to have a ton of lenses 'models'.

I've always been short-sighted (around -5) and in my early 50's got varifocals. Did a 2 for 1 thing with Specsavers and had Essilor Panamic lenses in my everyday pair and Specsavers own brand (they were using the Pentax name at the time, but they simply bought the name) as photochromic lenses in the other pair.

In use, they both seemed exactly the same (except one went dark!) and I took to them immediately - whatever I needed to do, they just worked without thinking about it. I was baffled by the fuss people made about varifocals.

My wife (very similar prescription to me) also got the same lenses and her results were the same.

Since then we've both had several pairs from various opticians and we've never quite repeated that experience. My last pairs had to be remade, although my wife was happy with hers. She's just had more and went back to Specsavers and had their "digital" lenses this time and wasn't happy with them at all. They cheerfully remade them but she's still always faffing with her glasses and tutting about them. She's more comfortable doing stuff on her phone without glasses on, which seems to defeat the main feature of "digital" lenses. I can see mine fine with glasses

[Paulsd]

I've been wearing glasses since I was 11 or 12 and when i was about 45 noticed that my arms weren't long enough

Since then (almost 5 years), I've had varifocals. At first, I was concerned about feedback from other people I knew who were falling down stairs etc.

I ended up with Essilor X lenses and had no issues at all. My close prescription wasn't too strong but my optician advised starting with varifocals sooner rather than later in order to make the transition to them a bit easier. The lenses are very expensive (at least compared to single vision) but advice given by the optician (perhaps upsell, but I hope not!) was that these lenses give a much better transition to cheaper lenses which apparently also helps with adapting to them.

Thankfully, I've never had issues and my prescription has changed over time.

The only small problem I have is with my newest pair in that I have issues with seeing my monitor clearly so have been using my older pair for work. Spoke to the optician and they're more than happy to take the new ones back and redo them to make them a bit better - just need to be less lazy and get them sorted.

Edited by Paulsd on Friday 18th August 10:03