Definition and causes

When light rays framework eye, breaking the eye cornea and lens. Rays, then assembled into a point behind the cornea, retina and here must be to ensure that the image is crisp, and you see things clearly. By myopia is the eye too long, so that light rays gathered at a point in front of the retina instead of on the retina (for further explanation, seerefractive error). After accumulating at a point cross beams each other and have spread a bit again when they hit the long eye retina. You can see why things unclear and blurred.

Light beams from things that are close to the eye, however, will spread over things that are far away, and this will offset the eye length, so that objects within a certain range can be seen clearly.

Myopia is a very common condition, seen in one out of six Danes. Myopia usually starts at the end of school age and deteriorate over time. There is a tendency to inheritance. In rarer cases, diabetes orcataractgive myopia.

Symptoms of myopia

Hovedsymptomet is obviously impaired vision: Things that are beyond a certain point, will appear dimmed and washed out. If a myopia is not corrected with glasses or similar, you will often get tension headaches, while squinting to see the horizontal lines sharper.

Precautions and diagnosis

If you are experiencing signs of myopia, one should go to an optician. Here determined how skewed the trough of light is related to the retina is located. This difference can be offset with a lens, which spread light rays in front of the eye so they in turn frames precisely on the retina. This is called aspread lens. Spreaders lens ensures that is to say that things at a distance seen as things that are near and so it is hard on the eye retina. The strength of the spread lens is described with dioptres, which is an expression of how much light broken. As a spread lens of course spreads light instead of bringing together what is being talked about by myopiaminus1 minus 2, etc. in power.

Select and complications

As I said, aggravated myopia up through adolescence, but after 25-30 years of age can be assumed that the condition is stable. It should nonetheless get his eyesight checked every two years. In addition to a small increased risk of retinal detachment, there are no complications for myopia. Since most people with age are more long-sighted (gammelmandssynorpresbyopia), Many believe that it reverses nearsighted unit. While this is the case, however, unlike the other with gammelmandssyn not need reading glasses.

The treatment of myopia

There are three types of treatment of myopia: glasses, contact lenses and laserbehandling / surgery.

Glasses and contact lenses

Here is the question before spreading lens in front of the eye and worn at all times. Contact lenses have the advantage that they can compensate for greater differences in visual acuity than spectacles, but they are in turn more cumbersome and can cause infections.

Laserbehandling / surgery

Instead of saying that the eye is too long, we could say that the cornea breaks "too much". If the cornea is not all light rays quite so much, would scroll Length fit. This takes advantage of a technique in which corneal refractive reduced with laser beams.

There are two techniques to laserbehandling. In the latest Prepare a small flap in the cornea and include the laser treatment (called LASIK). When the flap then put in place, the eye will be treated. This technique has been refined over the years with new scanning methods to improve results (called Zyoptix). In the older method (calledPRK) Laser treats Monday corneal very top layer directly. The two technologies differ in relation to the progress and complications, and you should consult an ophthalmologist for information on what treatment is best suited to your problem.