New Lasik Procedure Helps Patients Improve Vision

Lasik eye surgery has become more popular than ever before, with total procedures performed topping 700,000 last year according to consumer oriented website Angie’s List.  That number includes a new Lasik procedure called laser blended vision surgery.

Most individuals are affected by a condition called presbyopia as they age, a condition which causes the eye to lose its close-up focus ability.  Traditionally it has been treated using reading glasses or contact lenses.

Lasik surgery has been used in the past to treat presbyopia, but it was done by correcting one eye for distance and the other for close vision.  That resulted in a gap in vision in the middle range where neither eye could focus completely.

Laser blended vision surgery is now being used to treat presbyopia and emmetropia, including those with myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism. Laser blended vision is based on the basic Lasik procedure, but unlike the earlier surgical presbyopic correction it does not result in a vision gap.

The new blending technique take a similar approach as traditional Lasik surgery, correcting the dominant eye primarily for distance and the non-dominant eye for close up, but the new technique manages to increase the depth of field for each eye, resulting in a blended zone with clear focus in the intermediate vision range.

Practitioners of blended vision Lasik surgery report success rates of up to 97 percent. “I had been wearing glasses for over 45 years and have been using progressives for the last 10 years. After completion of the blended vision procedure I am able to both read and see distances clearly without the use of corrective lenses,” says a patient of the Clearview Vision Institute of Canada, Philip J. Gertler.

From a patient standpoint the pre- and post-op procedures are essentially identical to traditional Lasik.  The surgery takes 10-15 minutes and recovery generally takes a few hours.