How Can I Tell If I Need New Glasses?

As you grow and develop, everything about your body changes, including your eyes. While your vision may be clear and crisp when you’re a child, over time you may have difficulty seeing things in the distance or up close. 

Maybe your night vision becomes hazy, or maybe you feel like it’s a struggle to make things out that were perfectly clear before.

Fortunately, there’s a treatment for vision changes like these — new glasses, and at Omphroy Eye Care, board-certified ophthalmologist Dr. Luis Omphroy provides comprehensive eye exams to check the health of your eyes and determine how much your vision needs to be corrected with eyeglasses or contact lenses. 

Here are some of the ways you can tell you may need new glasses or a prescription change.

Common eye problems

The most common type of vision problem is refractive errors. These errors occur when the shape of your eye or any of its structures prevents incoming light from being tightly focused on your retina. Refractive errors include: 

• Nearsightedness (myopia)
• Farsightedness (hyperopia)
• Astigmatism (change in the shape of the cornea)
• Presbyopia (lens becomes less flexible as you age; can’t focus light as well)

With a regular eye exam, we can diagnose all of these sight problems. Dr. Omphroy tests different lenses to see which make your vision clearer.

Signs you need new glasses

There are a number of signs that indicate you need glasses or a change in prescription.

Squinting

You squint when you want to see something but need to bring it into focus. When you squint, the eye's cornea and/or lens changes shape, allowing less light to enter and make it to the retina, the light-sensing tissue at the back of the eye. 

This narrowed focus helps things look sharper. Squinting is one of the most prominent signs of eye changes.

Blurry vision

Blurry vision can be relatively innocuous, such as indicating a prescription change, or it can be serious, as is the case with many eye diseases. The only way to tell for sure is to come in for an eye exam. 

Most commonly, blurred vision is a sign of myopia (can see close up but blurry far away), hyperopia (can see far away but blurry close up), or astigmatism, an abnormal curvature of the cornea. All of these are easily corrected with glasses or contact lenses.

Eye strain

Basically, eye strain means your eyes are tired. That can result from poor lighting, stress, fatigue, computer use, and underlying vision conditions. Eye strain can hinder your ability to concentrate on what you need to do.

Common eye strain symptoms include:

• Headaches
• Spasms in eye muscles 
• Itchy or watery eyes
• Sensitivity to light
• Sore back and neck
• Blurred vision

Since strain can impair your ability to concentrate, adjusting your environment, such as adding more light or working on stress reduction, is a key part of getting relief.

Needing longer arms

There’s a joke among people in their early to mid-40s that their arms are no longer long enough to read close up. 

What’s happening is that the cornea changes shape at about this age, causing vision changes such as no longer being able to do close-up work without everything appearing blurry. 

This is due to presbyopia, where the lens loses flexibility and cannot bend the incoming light enough to focus properly on the retina. This is easily corrected either with reading glasses or with bifocals if you also need distance correction.

Difficulty seeing at night

Night blindness, which makes seeing in dim light or at night difficult, can also mean you need glasses. The cause may be as simple as being myopic (nearsighted). 

But night blindness can also be a symptom of cataracts, when the lens clouds over, or retinitis pigmentosa, when the dark pigments in the retina cause tunnel vision. These eye problems compromise your ability to drive and ultimately to see, so come into our office for an eye exam.

You should have a comprehensive eye exam once a year, not just for refractive errors but also for your overall eye health. 

If it’s been a while since you’ve had an exam, or if you’re having any of the issues we’ve discussed, call our Aiea, Hawaii, office at 808-487-7700 today.