Do you ever feel frustrated that you need glasses to read your text messages, a menu, or this magazine—but you don’t want to wear eyeglasses? Monovision contact lenses offer a solution.
It’s common for adults to develop presbyopia, an aging eye condition, starting in their 40s. This causes difficulty focusing on close-up objects but can be treated with glasses, contact lenses, artificial lens implants, or surgery, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Monovision contact lenses offer similar perks to other types of contacts in that once you’ve adjusted to them, you hardly notice they’re there and they reduce dependency on glasses. The difference is that a doctor fits one lens to correct distance vision in the dominant eye while the other corrects near vision. This also benefits some patients experiencing double vision with distance-only contacts.
Jenna Korsan, O.D., an optometrist with Simon Eye in Delaware, says it takes about a week of daily wear to adjust to monovision contacts. “Monovision usually gives you fairly sharp vision once you adapt to it, but it does take away some depth perception,” she says. “The main concern with monovision contacts is that nighttime driving can be kind of difficult.”
The most common solution is progressive glasses because they provide clear vision for all distances, including intermediate distance for computer usage. Bifocals just account for distance and near vision. Multifocal contacts offer a similar solution but with a tradeoff of less-sharp vision.
“With monovision, we can really only correct the far distance in the dominant eye, and then we have to either choose the computer or up-close reading distance and fit for that exact power,” Korsan notes.
A combination of distance-only or monovision contacts and reading glasses often produces the sharpest overall vision, but options exist for different needs and preferences.
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