Anyone ever heard of children as young as 3 having to have contact lenses?

[girliefriend]

My friend told me recently that her 3 yr old son would have to have contact lenses as the difference in his eyes is too great for glasses, I was and How would you even put lenses in a 3 yr olds eyes? My dd would have gone ballistic if I went any where near her eyes!!! I told her that I would get a 2nd/ 3rd opinion as this doesn't sound right to me. Has anyone else been told this?

I meant "standard practice in the US".

It takes about a page of calculations Cote, but essentially a 20/20 image from, for example a +3.00 lens is larger than a 20/20 image from a -3.00 lens. The two would be impossible to fuse in spectacles. Because contact lenses are on the eye and therefore do not have a vertex distance the images are closer to being the same size.

We use the term hyperopia here and prescribing varies depending on the case. Children should naturally have a small amount of hyperopia that they then grow out of. If it is causing a problem we will prescribe low amounts otherwise not. Larger amounts are always prescribed.

My friend age 6 at school had them 35 years ago. We used to put them in a little case and take them to head teachers office. I moved just before I was 7 so she must have been 5 or 6

jabber - Wouldn't you agree that in the vast majority of cases with very different prescriptions, we are talking about the same kind of eyesight problem - for example, both myopia but one -0.25 and the other -3.50?

Do you think image size will be different on the retina in this case?

This is my case. One eye is normal enough that I can drive without contacts but find it disorienting, especially outside the house (where I see further in the distance).

I thought you see a smaller image when you over-correct the problem. For example, you can read smallest letters with -1.75 but think you see clearer with -2.5. With the latter the image is definitely smaller.

I have had this over-correction for quite a while as well, actually, but have not had a lazy eye problem, which I did have during the time when I stopped wearing contacts.

I asked the question about hypermetropia because around here (in France), children are routinely prescribed glasses for it. DD was tested and told to wear glasses although prescription was quite small, and I didn't see a page-long calculation. It looked pert automatic, actually. I was just wondering what the practice was elsewhere.

just to add that contact lenses have actually been used quite a lot in children who have had to have congenital cataracts removed as the glasses needed would have been so thick and heavy (although i think more and more they are now inserting a plastic lens into the eye itself)

but it definitely is possible that contact lenses would be advised in young children no matter how impossible it sounds to insert them - i presume its like anything with practice ( inserting catheters or peg tubes etc ) if its going to help !

Cote, yes any significant amount of anisometropia (such as yours) will cause a difference in image size even with 20/20 correction and over-correcting a myope will definitely cause minimization.

My friend has to put a contact in her baby's eye (she has just had her first birthday) as she has a cataract.

So from that POV, entirely possible.

Tavker, my dd has just got her first pair of glasses at the age of 13. She had her eyes tested at around 5 or 6 and had perfect vision but her eysight has deterioted so badly that she was given glasses the same day and I was surprised at how strong they are.

The one thing the optician asked was if she read a lot, which she does. He also said that people who read a lot are more likely to be short sighted and that a study was done in China of medical students and something like 98% of them were short sighted which was put down to them reading a lot.

I think it's partly genetics as well, I'm short sighted and dh is practically blind in one eye. He wears glasses all the time and one lens is just plain glass as he really can't see anything out of it anyway.

I'm the only one in our family to be short sighted. I've always read a lot and was into encyclopedias as a child. I don't thunk anyone doubts that short sightedness had to do with reading a lot - i.e. focusing on a fixed-distance nearby object for extended periods of time.

i heard that a recent study had actually postulated that not enough natural light was a factor for shortsight. I thought that was really interesting as our cave dwelling ancestors would have been outdoors in all daylight hours and that our eyes have never adapted to indoor living.

i suppose those who read more could also be indoors more ??

Hello! (hope there's still people here!!!)
I've only just joined and came across this thread. My daughter who is now 2 was born with a congential unilateral cataract. They removed her lens when she was 4 weeks old. Since then she has worn a contact lens. It was absolutely hell to put it in and take it out to start with, but the more I did it, the easier it became. To start off with the prescription was +29, it's now +21.5. She recently started to wear biofocal glasses too. Bilateral cataracts (one in each eye) are genetic, but unilateral are not. It was suggested that she just scratched her eye in the womb. If the cataract was left her brain would have 'switched' her eye off. She also wears a patch for half her waking day on her good eye to make her bad eye stronger.

My ds(5) has worn contact lenses for the last year or so. He has nystagmus and the position of his null point (when his eyes stop moving) is to one side. So he never looked through the centre of his glasses properly. Contacts have made huge difference. We had a few probs to begin with but now it is just a 30 second job every morning and night. He has 30 day disp soft lenses at moment so it still means solutions etc but no real issues so far

CoteDAzur - the reason for the differing retinal image sizes is that glasses sit away from the eye, whilst contact lenses sit on the eye. Hence with anisometropia better binocular vision is achieved with contacts as the brain can combine similar image sizes but not differing ones.

Tavker - i think its worth persevering with the gas perms, I have seen children where its made a difference, if she's having insertion probs then a smaller diameter lens may help.
Myopia is a combination of genetics and enviroment, so its very important your daughter doesn't spend too long reading, using the computer without ensuring she alters her focus every 10 minutes or so, looking out of the window or a distance object.

I've fitted lenses to children of 6 months, usually if they've been born with a cataract that's been removed. At that age they'd be fitted with extended wear lenses - so ones they sleep with.