Astigmatism is a common eye condition affecting an estimated 40% of adults and 15% of children around the world. And yet even those who have astigmatism often don’t know exactly what it is.
When light rays enter your eye, they hit the front surface (the cornea) and go through the pupil (the tiny opening in the center of your iris, the colored part of your eye). In a spherical eye—one that has a front surface shaped like a basketball—those light rays come into one point of focus. In an astigmatic eye, the front surface of the eye isn’t perfectly round; it’s shaped more like an American football, with a long horizontal curve and a short vertical curve. So when light rays hit the cornea, they bend and focus onto two different points inside the eye, causing blurred vision. The degree to which vision will be blurry is based on the severity of the astigmatism.
Researchers don’t know exactly why astigmatism happens. One of the most common theories is that lid pressure on the eye creates a flattening that causes the spherical curvature of the eye to become more football-shaped. This may help explain why astigmatism becomes more common as we age. But what about astigmatism in children?
“Babies can be born with astigmatism and it resolves on its own,” says Giovanna E. Olivares, OD, Global Astigmatism Platform Director, Johnson & Johnson. “In other instances, kids develop it as they grow. But because they may be unlikely to complain about blurred or distorted vision, they often go undiagnosed. Without treatment, severe degrees of uncorrected astigmatism can lead to amblyopia (lazy eye).”
Luckily, astigmatism can be addressed with glasses or contact lenses. And new technologies developed by Johnson & Johnson are helping adults with both astigmatism and age-related loss of focusing or accommodation (otherwise known as presbyopia), another common vision condition, which happens when the lens of the eye stiffens and thickens, reducing its ability to change shape and focus on up-close objects. The new Acuvue® Oasys Max 1-Day Multifocal for Astigmatism—the first daily disposable contact lens that
corrects the vision of presbyopic patients at multiple distances
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What makes these contact lenses such a game changer?
Olivares, who oversaw the development of this new lens over the course of the roughly five years it took to create, breaks down the four technologies that distinguish it from any other lens in the world:
1. Pupil Optimized Design As we get older, our pupils actually get smaller. But pupil size also varies depending on vision-correction needs—something Olivares and her team discovered several years ago when working on the optical design of the lens.
“We discovered that nearsighted people tend to have larger pupils compared to farsighted people,” she says. “So we thought, ‘If the pupil changes with age and the prescription a patient has, then we need to optimize the optical design of our presbyopic contact lens based on a patient’s age and prescription.”
The technology turns out to be especially helpful for presbyopic patients, who often have trouble switching comfortably between seeing far off and up close. When presbyopia sets in, typically around age 40, changes start happening to the lens inside the eye, which is what helps us focus. Olivares says you can think of the eye’s lens kind of like a smartphone’s camera lens: It adjusts its focus automatically whether we’re looking at something in the distance or right in front of us. As we age and the eye’s lens gets stiffer, its ability to change shape to help us focus diminishes.
The Pupil Optimized Design, which is featured in all Acuvue multifocal contact lenses, tailors 100% of parameters to pupil size variations across age and refraction (compared to only 2% for the leading competitor). “It mimics the function of the lens inside the eye by providing the focusing that the eye needs in order to see things at a distance, intermediate and near,” explains Olivares. “It essentially helps your eye autocorrect focus so you can comfortably see both far away and up close.”
2. OptiBlue™ Light Filter As we spend more time on digital devices (research suggests roughly four in 10 adults in the U.S. are online almost constantly), we’re exposed to more blue-violet light. But blue-violet light isn’t just emitted from our devices; it’s all around us, coming from LED headlights, fluorescent light and especially the sun. These shorter wavelengths scatter light more and can impact visual clarity, which you might notice as starbursts or halos around light, especially at night. And if you’re over 40 and presbyopia has set in, you’ll experience even more light scatter. In fact, light scatter doubles by age 60, and it triples by age 70, says Olivares.
Enter OptiBlue Light Filter technology, which filters about 60% of blue-violet light*, the highest in the industry‡, according to research published in the journal Eye & Contact Lens.
3. TearStable™ Technology Every time you blink, you reestablish your tear film—a thin layer of tears that coats the surface of the eye and plays a crucial role in lubricating the eye, which helps maintain overall ocular health and vision. When we’re looking at screens, we blink 60% less because we aren’t reestablishing that tear film. And as we age, our tear film becomes less stable, which may ultimately lead to more dryness and discomfort of the eyes.
The TearStable Technology in the Acuvue Oasys Max 1-Day Multifocal for Astigmatism lens prolongs the tear film stability and loses less moisture (its evaporation rate is two times lower than the leading competitor). In other words: The technology helps the eye’s tear film work as it should to lubricate the eye, whether you’re blinking less due to too much screen time, your tear film is naturally decompensating—or both.
“PVP, the wetting agent in the material of our contact lenses—what we call our secret sauce—is distributed throughout the entire lens and on the surface, which helps the eye’s tear film work as it should, which in turn improves vision and contributes to the lens’ ability to provide all-day comfort,” says Olivares.
4. Blink Stabilized Design This is the technology that helps to correct astigmatism. With an astigmatic eye, light enters and bends into two-point focus that needs to come into one-point focus on the retina for vision to be clear. Correcting this requires two different powers of vision correction delivered in a very precise orientation.
In a nonastigmatic eye that’s spherical, vision can be corrected with just one power. And if you’re correcting vision in that nonastigmatic eye (spherical) with a contact lens, it doesn’t matter how the lens sits on the eye or how it moves. With an astigmatic eye that needs two powers in a precise orientation, however, the contact lens needs to sit in a more precise orientation on the eye, with less movement. Treating astigmatism with contact lenses had always been difficult because contact lenses must be able to move on the eyes in order to keep eyes healthy.
“We had to find a way to make it so the contact lens could move, but not so much that the powers wouldn’t orient properly in an astigmatic eye,” says Olivares.
To do that, Johnson & Johnson put stability zones, or “bumps,” on the outer surface of the contact lens that are located at 3 o’clock and 9 o’clock and are smaller than the diameter of a strand of hair. This enables the eyelids to realign the contact lens every time you blink.
“Just because you have astigmatism doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve the gift of clear sight,” says Olivares. “That’s why we innovate. And until we created this lens, we didn’t have daily disposable contacts for our presbyopic patients who also had astigmatism.”
Learn more about Acuvue Oasys Max 1-Day Multifocal for Astigmatism, including the product’s
important safety information
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*Filtering of HEV light by contact lenses has not been demonstrated to confer any health benefit to the user, including but not limited to retinal protection, protection from cataract progression, reduced eye strain, improved contrast, improved acuity, reduced glare, improved low light vision or improved circadian rhythm/sleep cycle. The Eye Care Professional should be consulted for more information.
‡Versus publicly available information for standard daily use contact lenses as of December 2024.
