Elderly people may avoid falls if they take off their bifocal or multifocal eyeglasses while participating in outdoor activities and rely on single-vision lenses instead, a new study suggests.
As individuals age, they often develop difficulty viewing things at close range, even if they already wear eyeglasses to see at a distance. Instead of using several pairs of eyeglasses , they often turn to multifocal lenses — bifocals, trifocals and progressive lenses.
But multifocal eyeglasses can affect balance and increase the risk of falls , 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 glasses when walking outdoors .
Around half of the participants were prescribed a pair of single-lens distance eyeglasses to use when outdoors or in new 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 focus group. Among those who routinely spent time outdoors, falls decreased by about 40 percent . But outdoor falls increased among those who rarely went outside, suggesting that the single-lens eyeglasses aren’t a good option for those individuals.
Once you enter your 40s the effects of presbyopia start to become noticeable and you notice it is more difficult to comfortably read the newspaper, accomplish simple tasks at home or at your job , read the “fine print” on contracts, or worse, read the small print on medicine bottles that may be required to save your life; in other words, just about everything.
What this research seriously shows us is the requirement for all those who wear eyeglasses to have and make use of multiple types of glasses when in different situations. The problem with this is the expense of buying numerous pairs of eyeglasses. Most people today simply can’t afford to do that with the cost of eyeglasses at traditional optometrists’ offices.
The solution for most of us is to shop eyeglasses online and purchase our mutiple pairs of glasses through an online glasses supplier who can match our prescription strength to any number of frame styles while staying within a much smaller budget.
Optometrists’ offices charge a much higher mark-up on the cost of eyeglasses to offset their overhead and increase profits. The actual price of glasses is far lower, so patients can get a much better deal on glasses by shopping online.
Online shopping for prescription glasses can enable people to buy their different types of glasses to match their varried living situations, offsetting the risk of falling we’ve seen in the study.