Elderly people may avoid falls if they take off their multifocal or bifocal eyeglasses while participating in outdoor activities and rely on single-vision lenses instead, a new study suggests.
As men and women age, they frequently develop problems viewing things at close range, even if they already wear glasses to see at a distance. Instead of using several pairs of glasses , they frequently turn to multifocal lenses — bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses.
But multifocal eyeglasses can affect balance and increase the risk of falling , research indicates.
For their study published online May 25 in the BMJ, Stephen Lord, senior principal research fellow at Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute in New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues recruited 606 men and women over the age of 65 who were at risk of falling and who used multifocal lenses when going outside .
About half of the participants were prescribed a pair of single-lens distance eyeglasses to use when outside or in unfamiliar places.
Over 13 months of follow-up, all falls among the individuals who used the single-lens distance eyeglasses fell by 8 percent compared to the control group. Among the participants who regularly spent time outside, falls decreased by about 40% . But outside falls increased among those who seldom went outdoors, suggesting that the single-lens glasses aren’t a good alternative for those people.
Once you enter your 40s the effects of presbyopia begin to become evident and you notice it is tougher to comfortably peruse the newspaper, accomplish simple tasks at home or at your job , read the “fine print” on contracts, or worse, read the information on medicine bottles that might be vital to save your life; in other words, just about everything.
What this research truly shows us is the necessity for all those who wear glasses to have and make use of multiple types of eyeglasses when in different circumstances. The problem with this is the cost of buying multiple pairs of eyeglasses. Most people simply can’t afford to do that with the cost of glasses at traditional optometrists’ offices.
The solution for most of us is to shop eyeglasses online and acquire our mutiple pairs of eyeglasses through an online glasses supplier who can match our prescription strength to any number of frame styles while staying within a much more limited budget.
Optometrists’ offices charge a much higher mark-up on the price of eyeglasses to offset their overhead and maximize profits. The true price of glasses is far lower, so individuals can get a far better deal on eyeglasses by shopping online.
Online shopping for prescription glasses can enable people to obtain their different types of glasses to match their varried living situations, offsetting the risk of falling we’ve seen in this study.
