Monday, July 06, 2009

Refractive disorders: Astigmatism.(2) Appearance

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Appearance of astigmatic eye

As I wrote in a previous post, one characteristic of the astigmatic eye is that the external face of its cornea -1- is not spherical (as a pure myopic or hyperopic eye), but elliptical. It is similar an American football cut in half (CORNEAL ASTIGMATISM).

But astigmatism may be more complicated than all that, since because the cornea has a thickness, the curvature of the internal face of the cornea may also cause an astigmatism that is more complicated to diagnose and treat; the same happens with the one that is caused also because of an unusual slope of the crystalline lens -8 (INTERNAL ASTIGMATISMS). Those last cases are less frequent.

But both of them (corneal and internal ones), may exist at the same time; and the addition of both, is the result of the total astigmatism that one person has got.

This typical shape of the ocular surfaces causes that their different "meridians" (horizontal and vertical ones) do not have the same power; therefore, some of them are more curve than others, and this causes the light is focused on two or more planes regarding the retina, instead of only on the retina itself. The light is clearly focused along one plane but is blurred along the other. The result is blurred vision at all distances.


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