One of the fears for many contact lens wearers is not being able to use their lenses when they start to experience reading difficulties after 40.  The truth is you can still very much wear your contact lenses even when you start to notice some blur vision when you are reading your newspaper.

According to Dr. Pang, there are many options available.  We summarized some options into a table for your reference.

Soft contact lens:

Monovision is the simplest way to solve reading problems while you are using contact lenses (Figure 1).  During this fitting process, Dr. Pang will determine which side is your dominant eye. Normally, he will choose the dominant eye for your distant vision (pink color in the photo).  And he will let you use the non-dominant eye (green) for reading.  Unfortunately, this does not work for

everybody because some people have strong binocular preference, and just do not have a non-dominant eye.  For these patients we will need to put them in multifocal contact lenses.

Multifocal contact lenses come in different designs.  The most common design is the aspheric lens (Figure 2).  This design makes use of the variable curvature of the front surface to induce a different power for the wearer to see distance and near (as seen in the photo, it has both distance and near power in the same lens).  In order for this lens to work, it has to perfectly centered on the eyes with minimal movement, otherwise, wearers will not be able to experience the maximum benefit of both distance and near vision.

Another design is called modified monovision (Figure 3).  With this type of contact lens, Dr. Pang will use a multifocal lens with the distance power at the center on the dominant eye , and he will place a multifocal lens with the near power at the center on the non-dominant eye. 

Gas permeable bifocal lenses:

Gas permeable lenses are rigid contact lenses, the fitting

philosophy is quite different from the soft multifocal lenses.

Since the gas permeable sits loosely on your cornea, it allows

the contact lens to translate upward when you look down on

your reading material.  The most common design for this

category of lens is the segmented multifocal lens (figure 4). 

The lens looks like a bifocal eyeglass lens, they are weighted at

the bottom, so that the reading area always stay away from your line

of sight.  As the eyes look down the eye lid pushes the lens upward and brings the reading area in your line of sight.  It works very well for people who does a lot of reading and computer. Generally, the optics of gas permeable lenses is better than the soft lenses.  The only draw back of the gas permeable lenses

is the initial adaptation.  It usually takes about two week for the eyes to get accustom to the sensation of the gas permeable contact lenses.   Recently, another contact lens company name Synergeyes, manufactured a hybrid lens with a gas permeable lens at the center and a soft contact lens on the outside.  It has an aspheric multifocal design (figure 2), with a comfort similar to a soft contact lens.  With all these choices available, there is no reason for you to shy away from using contact lenses even when you are having difficulties in reading with your current contact lenses.

                                                                                                                     (Figure 4 courtesy of Truform optics)