Search for new solution to ‘old sight’ continues at the Accommodation Club
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World-leading scientists, technologists and clinicians have met at the 7th Accommodation Club in Miami, Florida as part of the continuing search for a new vision correction technology that will give presbyopes near vision as good as when they were young.
More than one billion people in the world are presbyopic, a figure that is rapidly increasing as the world’s population grows and ages. An estimated 517 million of these are without correction for functional presbyopia.
Presbyopia (or ‘old sight’) occurs when the eye’s natural lens hardens with age, gradually losing its flexibility and ability to change focus (its accommodation). This is largely dependent on the flexible lens being able to change shape and has a critical impact on the ability to focus on close objects, such as when reading. Most people will experience presbyopia by the age of 45, requiring glasses or lenses to see clearly and read.
The current best practice correction for presbyopia are reading, bifocal, or multifocal spectacles, or less successfully, contact lenses; and for cataract the best practice treatment is cataract extraction and intra-ocular lens (IOL) implantation. These conventional approaches suffer from many shortcomings causing vision problems, including limited range of near focus, low contrast, glare, haloes, optical distortion and aberrations, limited field of view and ghosting.
The Accommodation Club was established in 1991 by Professor Jean-Marie Parel from the University of Miami. It was co-hosted by the Brien Holden Vision Institute and Bascom Palmer Eye Institute (BPEI) at the University of Miami (ranked the no. 1 eye hospital in the US for consecutive years), and timed to coincide with the annual ARVO meeting held each year in Fort Lauderdale Florida – the largest annual international meeting in ophthalmology and vision science.
A record attendance this year is an excellent sign for research in an area that affects so many, according to Professor Parel. “We started many years ago as a handful of enthusiasts trying to solve the presbyopia problem,” he said. “It is wonderful to see so many world leading scientists all now paying attention to this vision problem.”
Professor Arthur Ho, Secretary General of the Accommodation Club and Chief Scientist and Technology Officer of the Presbyopia Programme at the Vision CRC, said, “This year, we had over 150 attendees. This record attendance demonstrates that the research world is becoming more aware of the importance and need to improve vision for presbyopes.”
Together with BPEI and the University of Miami, the Vision CRC and Brien Holden Vision Institute is organising and supporting this important event. A large number of researchers involved in the Vision CRC presbyopia programme from BPEI, Brien Holden Vision Institute and LV Prasad Eye Institute, attended and presented on topics including: anatomy, physiology and growth; mechanics and optics; imaging; vision; and existing and imminent technology for restoring accommodation.
Further information about the Accommodation Club and future meetings are available at: www.accommodationclub.org |
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