Accommodation in young adults wearing aspheric multifocal soft contact lenses

Abstract

The aim of the present project was to investigate accommodative behavior in young adults and adolescents fitted with an aspheric multifocal (center distance) contact lens with focus on evaluating whether these lenses can be an alternative treatment for subjects in which a reduced level of blur and thereby accommodation in near vision is aimed at. Twenty normal subjects aged between 21 and 35 years participated in the study. Aberrometry was perfomed using a Zywave™ aberrometer, first on the uncorrected eyes of all subjects, and again while the subjects wore a multifocal contact lens with a +1.00 add. A Shin-Nippon N Vision-K 5001 Autoref-Keratometer was used to measure accommodative response with two different refractive corrections: (1) habitual spectacle correction only, and (2) habitual correction and a aspheric multifocal (center distance) contact lens. Four hours of adaptation to the lens was allowed. The lag when wearing only the habitual spectacles was compared with the lag while wearing both the habitual spectacles and the aspheric multifocal contact lens. The mean lag of accommodation for the subject group was 0.85 D (±0.57 SD) and 0.75 D (±0.52 SD) without and with the multifocal lens, respectively. Statistical analyses showed no difference in lag (t = 0.8479, p = 0.407) with and without the lens. In conclusion, young normal subjects do not relax accommodation when fitted with aspheric multifocal center distance lenses when the addition is +1.00. It is therefore unlikely that subjects with accommodative ability, in whom the treatment purpose is to reduce blur and thereby accommodation, can be effectively treated with such lenses.