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What Is Myopia Control?
Although an outright cure for nearsightedness has not been discovered,  Atlantic Family Eye Care now offers a number of treatments that may be able to slow the progression of myopia.

These treatments can induce changes in the structure and focusing of the eye to reduce stress and fatigue associated with the development and progression of nearsightedness.

Why should you be interested in myopia control? Because slowing the progression of myopia may keep your child from developing high levels of nearsightedness that require thick, corrective eyeglasses and have been associated with serious eye problems later in life, such as early cataracts or even a detached retina.

Currently, three types of treatment are showing promise for controlling myopia: ​
Atropine Eye Drops
Atropine eye drops have been used for myopia control for many years, with effective short-term results. But use of these eye drops also has some drawbacks.

Topical atropine is a medicine used to dilate the pupil and temporarily paralyze accommodation and completely relax the eyes' focusing mechanism.

Atropine typically is not used for routine dilated eye exams because its actions are long-lasting and can take a week or longer to wear off. (The dilating drops your eye doctor uses during your eye exam typically wear off within a couple hours.)

Because research has suggested nearsightedness in children may be linked to focusing fatigue, investigators have looked into using atropine to disable the eye's focusing mechanism to control myopia.

Multifocal Contact Lenses
Multifocal contacts are special lenses that have different powers in different zones of the lens to correct presbyopia as well as nearsightedness or farsightedness (with or without astigmatism).
But researchers and eye doctors are finding that conventional or modified multifocal soft contact lenses also are effective tools for myopia control.

We offer The MiSight® 1 day lens which is clinically proven to slow the progression of myopia when initially prescribed for children 8-12 years old. Over three years, MiSight reduced myopia progression by 59%, versus a single vision 1 day lens.1

Myopia Control Glasses
Nearsighted glasses for myopia control are eyeglasses with specially designed multifocal lenses to slow the progression of myopia (nearsightedness) in children. This innovation in eyeglass lens technology is relatively new; myopia control lenses are being developed in response to the significant increase in nearsightedness among children worldwide over the past several decades.

The H.A.L.T. technology in Stellest lenses consists of a central zone for clear far vision, surrounded by 11 rings of aspheric “lenslets” that alter how the peripheral part of the lens bends the light that’s entering the eye. This unique multifocal design reduces the tendency of the eyeball to grow longer in childhood, which causes nearsightedness to worsen.
Despite their advanced multifocal design for myopia control, Stellest lenses look virtually identical to standard (“single vision”) eyeglass lenses prescribed for nearsighted children.

Myopia progression was slowed more than 60% in children ages 8-13 wearing nearsighted glasses with Stellest lenses, compared with myopia progression in children who wore standard single vision lenses as the control group.