What is the best age to have LASIK. My opinion would be in the late twenties. I will explain to your the reasons why in this article.

The main consideration with having LASIK too young is that the eye is still growing and the prescription may still be changing. There is a large amount of variation as to when this occurs. But generally, most peoples eyeglass prescription stop changing around their early twenties. The most important thing is that on your eye exam the prescription remains the same for a couple of years. If you visit a LASIK surgeon for the first time make sure to bring your most updated prescription. Otherwise, its difficult to know if your eye prescription is changing. Why is this an issue? Well, if you treat someone and there prescription changes then the effect of the LASIK is going to wear off. As far as we know, LASIK does not affect eye growth.

How about being too old? Well as you get older there are two issues. The first issue is that another medical condition in the eye may be limiting the vision. If this is the case it is usually a cataract; a natural clouding of the lens. LASIK does not treat cataracts, the only surgical treatment for cataracts is to remove the cataract and place a lens implant. So, as people get older they may have other eye conditions.

However, there is another issue. At the time of cataract surgery a lens implant is placed into the eye. This lens implantation gives us the ability to treat the eyeglass prescription in many people at the time of surgery. The downside to LASIK is that our measurements to ascertain the correct lens implant power is less accurate in a patient who had LASIK. Therefore in patients who are older the effect of the LASIK may be shortened by the development of cataracts and once the cataracts develop our lens implant measurements are inaccurate.

The third issue is presbyopia, needing additional power to read up close. Patients who are presbyopic or emerging into presbyopia may find they will still need reading glasses after LASIK. This can be treated with monovision correction, but not everybody is a good candidate for monovision. Presbyopia usually begins to occur around age 40. People who are nearsighted can often offset the presbyopia by taking off their glasses to read. This crutch is gone when the nearsightedness is corrected by LASIK.

Everybody wants to know that the LASIK treatment will last forever. While this is unrealistic due to other conditions that effect the eye. There are age considerations will dictate on average how long you can expect the surgery to last. That is why I recommend the late twenties as the ideal age. A person's eyes will likely have stopped growing and there are many years before presbyopia and cataracts develop. The second best time is probably early thirties and early to mid fourties. Early thirties because there are still a number of years before cataracts and presbyopia. Early to mid forties because if you have developed presbyopia by this time you can make a very educated decision if you would like monovision or not.