Accommodative Behavior of Eyes Wearing Aspheric Single Vision Contact Lenses.

SIGNIFICANCE

Wearing aspheric contact lenses adds significant amounts of negative spherical aberration (SA). Also, when accommodated and converged to near targets, pupil size shrinks and SA shift from positive to more negative direction. Interestingly, in this study, pupil miosis was fully or partially able to compensate for the additional accommodation-induced negative SA.

PURPOSE

The present study aims to examine the accommodative response characteristics of young eyes fit with aspheric single vision contact lenses (SVCLs) that add significant negative SA to the eye responding to a wide range of accommodation stimuli.

METHODS

Using a Shack-Hartmann aberrometer, the accommodation behavior in eight young adult eyes (mean age and spherical equivalent is 27.25 ± 2.05 years and -1.75 ± 1.80D, respectively) was measured while subjects fixated binocularly and monocularly 20/40 letter E, which were moved from 2 m to 20 cm (0.5 to 5D) in 0.25D steps. Using natural pupils, refractive state was defined using three standard criteria: the dioptric power that (1) minimized the root mean square error (minRMS), (2) best-fit paraxial, and (3) provided the peak image quality (peak IQ).

RESULTS

Wearing aspheric lenses with negative SA shifts the mean SA of the unaccommodated eyes from +0.05 μm (eyes only) to -0.029 μm (eyes + SVCL) and increases the negative SA for the eye + lens when accommodating from -0.029 to -0.07 μm for natural pupils. Aberration changes with accommodation were attenuated by the accommodative pupil miosis, which reduced binocular viewing pupil diameters from 3.9 to 3.3 mm. This alteration of the typical SA levels by the aspheric SVCL did not prevent accurate accommodation (mean ± standard deviation accommodative lag under binocular viewing were -0.08 ± 0.12D, -0.38 ± 0.12D, and -0.26 ± 0.08D for paraxial, minRMS, and peak IQ, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS

These data clearly show that aspheric contact lenses designed to correct some or all of the unaccommodated eye's positive SA do not interfere with accommodation.