Future contact lenses could change a kid's eyeball shape, preventing nearsightedness

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Future contact lenses could change a kid’s eyeball shape, preventing nearsightedness

If you’re either nearsighted or farsighted, the problem is simply caused by an irregularity in the shape of your eyes, they’re elongated on one side or the other, changing the focal distance between your lens and the back of your eye. But in the future, corrective contact lenses could normalize the eyeball shape in small children to prevent vision defects.

Myopia develops when the eye is too long, making it difficult to focus light from distant objects on the retina. Glasses or contact lenses that correct the defocus on the main visual axis can create a slight degree of farsightedness in the peripheral retina, Troilo says. The peripheral farsightedness may worsen myopia because as children grow, the eye grows to move the retina to where the light is focused, naturally lengthening the eye even further.

Troilo has shown that specially designed contact lenses that alter how light is focused in the peripheral retina can induce changes in growth that help reshape the eye in the desired way. The experimental lenses use different focal powers within a single lens: either alternating focal powers across the lens, or confined to the outer edge. Experiments with the new lenses found that they changed eye growth and refractive state, or focus, in a predictable way. The lenses successfully reduced the elongation of the eye that causes myopia progression.

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