The July 2013 issue of the journal Eye & Contact Lens published one in a long line of studies that have shown that orthokeratology is effective in stabilizing or slowing the progression of myopia in children.
Orthokeratology is a doctor-provided vision correction treatment that reshapes your cornea while you sleep so that you have perfect vision during the day with no glasses, no contacts, no surgery. Orthokeratology is also sometimes called “corneal reshaping”, “corneal molding”, “overnight vision correction” or “ortho-K”.
Myopia is a serious problem because it gets worse over time. And it does not only mean that your vision will get blurry over time. It also means that you are at increased risk for permanent vision loss due to diseases like glaucoma or emergencies like retinal detachments.
The study, published in the July 2013 issue of the journal Eye & Contact Lens sought to determine whether overnight orthokeratology has an impact on a child’s spectacles prescription over a period of up to 8 years. In the study, a group of kids with no orthokeratology treatment was compared with a group that received the treatment.
The results shows that on the whole, the children treated with orthokeratology showed a significantly more stable spectacles prescription than the children who did received orthokeratology treatment. An impressive 64% of the eyes treated with orthokeratology stopped getting worse all together. As the authors put it, they “demonstrated an apparent total arrest of manifest myopic refractive change.”
The study’s authors concluded that the study provides evidence that orthokeratology can reduce the rate of progression of childhood myopia over the long term.
Source:
Eye & Contact Lens
Corneal Reshaping Influences Myopic Prescription Stability (CRIMPS): An Analysis of the Effect of Orthokeratology on Childhood Myopic Refractive Stability
Eye Contact Lens 2013 Jul 01;[EPub Ahead of Print], LE Downie, R Lowe