What is the right age for eye surgery? Anyone who is over 18 to 21 years old, with a stable refraction may be a candidate for LASIK. The stability of your vision and the overall health of your eyes are the key factors in deciding if LASIK is right for you.
The Minimum Age for Eye Surgery
Nearly anyone with refractive errors such as myopia (nearsightedness), mild hyperopia (farsightedness), or astigmatism could benefit from LASIK. However, if a patient's vision is not stable before the LASIK surgery, the results of the surgery can be very short-lived. For this reason, LASIK is generally performed only on patients with a stable refraction.
Vision changes in children are extremely common. LASIK is rarely appropriate for patients under 18, and Woodhams may recommend that you wait until you are 21 years old in order to be sure that your vision is stable. Vision can change at any point in life, but for many people vision is stable from the 20s until presbyopia becomes apparent around the age of 40 to 45.
LASIK for Aging Eyes
Most laser eye surgery patients are between ages of 25 and 42. There is no maximum age for LASIK, but LASIK might not be the best option for all patients. For example, many older patients who need corrective lenses for refractive errors may also have other conditions, including presbyopia and cataracts which cannot be treated with LASIK. These conditions can both be treated in most patients with a procedure known as PreLex™.
Presbyopia and Cataracts
Presbyopia is a hardening of the natural crystalline lens of the eye, which makes it difficult to see up close. In a healthy eye, the crystalline lens flexes to focus properly. This ability declines with age.
A cataract is clouding of the crystalline lens of the eye that occurs naturally with age though it can also be caused by injury or disease. For patients over 50, cataract surgery is often the surgery that's right for their vision type as it addresses cataracts and refractive problems.
Patients with presbyopia and cataracts are often treated with PreLex™, which is short for Presbyopic Lens Exchange. PreLex™ involves removing the cloudy lens and replacing it with an artificial multi-focal lens which restores the vision at both near and far.
Because seniors may need this procedure regardless of whether they receive LASIK, it is important to consider the overall health of an individual's eyes to decide on the correct procedure. LASIK may fix your refractive errors but do nothing to treat the clouding lens or the loss of reading vision. As with any medical procedure, it is important to have an experienced surgeon to help you .
