A restaurant near where I grew up always served great food, but the place itself was a little old fashioned; I often felt like the youngest person who’d ever eaten there. A key detail: hanging from hooks next to the menus were half a dozen pairs of reading glasses for customers who’d forgotten to bring their own.
Farsightedness (difficulty seeing things close up) is the most common vision problem for older people. Although it can be corrected with glasses, it can be inconvenient for people who already need spectacles to see clearly at a distance. Keeping track of two different pairs of glasses is something most people can happily live without.
As a solution, lots of people turn to multifocal lenses, such as bifocals or varifocals. These combine two or more different prescriptions in one lens, so far objects are clear when looking through the top part, and nearer objects are in focus when looking down.
Unfortunately, multifocal glasses have disadvantages. Distant objects in the lower part of your vision look blurred, and objects can appear to jump as your view of them switches from one part of the lens to another. For lots of people these problems are just an annoyance. However, for elderly people, the disorientation could actually increase their risk of injuring themselves in a trip or fall.
According to a new study, seniors who are fairly active may be better off avoiding multifocal lenses whenever they’re outside their homes. The researchers looked at around 600 Australians with an average age of 80, all of whom had been using multifocal lenses. Half were asked to switch to regular glasses when walking or standing anywhere outside their homes. The rest carried on using multifocal lenses.
Among more active people who switched to regular glasses, 52 percent had a fall during the 13-month study. This compared with 60 percent of people using multifocal lenses.
The benefits didn’t apply to older people who were less active. In fact, among less active seniors, falls became more common if people switched from multifocals to regular glasses.
The study concentrated on people who were at risk of falls: either people over the age of 80, or people over 65 who were frail or had fallen before. If you’re younger or quite fit, you may not need to worry so much about any disorientation from wearing multifocal glasses.
Even so, many people find that multifocal glasses take some getting used to. If you find that wearing them makes it hard to navigate steps, for example, you might want to think twice about wearing them when you’re outside your home.
The researchers recommend that people who have reasonable distance vision avoid multifocal lenses, using reading glasses for close work and not wearing glasses at all when walking outdoors. For people with poor vision at long distances who take part in outdoor activities, the researchers suggest wearing regular glasses when outdoors or in unfamiliar settings. For people who do little in the way of outdoor activity, the researchers say that multifocal glasses may be the best option.
What you need to know. For more active seniors who are at risk of a fall, using regular glasses instead of multifocals may be safer outside the home. However, this doesn’t apply to less active seniors. If you’re changing your glasses, ask your optometrist which type will best suit your lifestyle.
—Philip Wilson, patient editor, BMJ Group
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