Toric lenses provide a solution to a problem that a huge amount of people suffer from. It is estimated that nearly half of the global population have in some form and toric lenses have been developed to treat this common condition. Astigmatism tends to be present Astigmatism tends to be present from birth, and occurs when the irregular curvature of an eye means that the capacity to refract light within your eye fluctuates between different parts. Your eye then struggles to make the most of the light that enters it, meaning it cannot create a perfect picture. Without corrective lenses, sufferers would be left to live with blurry vision, and may struggle to perform daily tasks, such as driving and using a computer screen.
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Technology of a Toric Contact Lens
Toric Lenses over Spherical Lenses
As spherical lenses have the same corrective power in all meridians (areas of the lens), they can rotate on the eye after you blink, without having an effect on the quality of what you see. However, this is not appropriate for someone with astigmatism, as the shape of their eye means that they have a differing quality of vision in several parts of their eye. Instead, they require a lens with varying degrees of corrective power that also doesn’t rotate. There are further differences between toric and spherical lenses, which we detail here.
What do Toric Lenses do?
Toric lenses, first designed in 1978, were created to avoid the shortcomings of traditional, spherical lenses for sufferer of astigmatism. The lens shape contains a gradually varying degree of strengths, accommodating for the different amounts of vision in each part of your eye, and sits comfortably over its elongated shape. Many toric lenses are designed to be thicker at the bottom, using a technique called prism ballasting. This means that the bottom of the lens weighs more, so that gravity, as well as pressure from the upper eyelid, squeezes the thicker part of the lens out from under the upper lid. The lid pressure from blinking then keeps this in place.
Because the lens doesn’t move, the correct refractive strengths in the lens will always sit over the parts of the eye which require them. This differing level of refraction compensates for the irregularities which cause impaired vision. We explain this further here.
What Forms do Toric Lenses Come In?
The demand for toric lenses is so great that they come in many different forms. Toric lenses can be made of Silicone Hydrogel, Omafilcon A, Methafilcon A, Polymacon and Hilafilcon A or B, and have been developed so that there a number of options to suit all requirements. There are daily disposable and thirty-day options, as well as multiple colour choices, although these are mainly available in non-disposable form.
Soft and rigid gas-permeable (RGP) lenses are also available, with the RGP lenses being made of a stiff material that retains its shape when blinking. These may take a little bit of time for the eye to get used to, but can come in bifocal and multifocal designs like back toric, front toric and bitoric. With such a variety of options available, there should be a toric contact lens to suit all different requirements and preferences.