Cutting-Edge Advice for Healthy Living
By John Schieszer
No More Reading Glasses?
It may now be possible to get rid of your reading glasses permanently. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has now approved a new inlay procedure that can correct presbyopia and this new procedure should be available in Marbella soon. Presbyopia is a condition that develops around age 40 and it involves the gradual loss of your eyes' ability to focus on nearby objects.
Until now, you had to wear reading glasses or bifocals, or undergo surgical procedures.
The problem with the surgical procedures were that they could compromised a person’s distance vision and they often offered no guarantee of lasting success. The new procedure is called the KAMRA inlay and it is pretty simple. It involves inserting a tiny black ring into the eye. The ring focuses light properly onto the retina and creates sharper near vision.
Dr. Tom Tooma, who is the founder of NVISION Eye Centres, helped pioneer this new technique. He has been performing it in both California and Oregon. He says the KAMRA inlay is smaller and thinner than a contact lens and can be inserted in an outpatient procedure performed in approximately 15 minutes. Implanted in a pocket within the cornea, the KAMRA inlay relies on small aperture optics designed to increase depth-of-focus.
Dr. Tooma adds that, as this simple new technique becomes widely available in Spain and around the world, we can look for reading glasses to become a thing of the past, much like rotary telephones and cassette tapes. According to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, more than one billion people worldwide suffer from presbyopia.
Life Expectancy Climbing Worldwide
If you think people around the world are living much longer, you are right. A new study just published in The Lancet has found that global life expectancy has risen by more than six years since 1990 as healthy life expectancy grows.
Researchers conducted an analysis of all major diseases and injuries in 188 countries. They found that thanks to marked declines in death and illness caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria in the past decade, and significant advances made in addressing communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional disorders, health has improved significantly around the world. Global life expectancy at birth for both sexes rose by 6.2 years (from 65.3 in 1990 to 71.5 in 2013), while healthy life expectancy (HALE), at birth rose by 5.4 years (from 56.9 in 1990 to 62.3 in 2013).
HALE takes into account not just mortality but also the impact of non-fatal conditions and summarises years lived with disability and years lost due to premature mortality. The increase in healthy life expectancy has not been as dramatic as the growth of life expectancy, and as a result people are living more years with illness and disability.
The study was conducted by an international consortium of researchers and led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington in Seattle. It shows that ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections and stroke cause the most health loss around the world. “The world has made great progress in health, but now the challenge is to invest in finding more effective ways of preventing or treating the major causes of illness and disability,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Theo Vos of IHME.
People in countries such as Nicaragua and Cambodia have experienced dramatic increases in healthy life expectancy since 1990, 14.7 years for Nicaragua and 13.9 years for Cambodia. The reverse was true for people in Botswana and Belize, which saw declines of two years and 1.3 years, respectively. The differences between countries with the highest and lowest healthy life expectancies is stark. In 2013, Lesotho had the lowest, at 42 years, and Japan had the highest globally, at 73.4 years.
John Schieszer is an award-winning international journalist and radio and podcast broadcaster of The Medical Minute. He can be reached at medicalminutes@gmail.com.
