What Is Toric Astigmatism?

Most people have heard of astigmatism. It's probably one of the main reasons many of us ended up with glasses as a kid. Basically, astigmatism is a condition in which the actual structure of the eye, namely the cornea, isn't symmetrical, which will have an affect on the way we see the world around us.

Astigmatism

• Astigmatism is basically an imperfection of the eye. It relates to the curvature of your cornea, which is the front-most portion of your eyeball. Normally, this section of your eye is symmetrical, essentially meaning that the entire surface is proportionate from side to side and up to down. However, when you have astigmatism, a segment of your cornea isn't curved in the exact same way as the rest. The presence of this imperfection will affect your eyesight. How much it affects your vision will be in direct correlation with the severity of the imperfection.

Toric Astigmatism

• Toric astigmatism is actually in reference to the corrective device used to treat the astigmatism. When you employ the use a contact lens to take care of astigmatism, you really want the lens itself to return to the exact same position it was in prior to blinking (lenses will generally rotate when a person blinks). Since the lenses are fashioned in such a way to accommodate for the imperfection in the cornea, if they were to rotate, the rectification would be out of place, and your eyesight would no longer be adjusted. When a toric lens is used to correct astigmatism, it will always rotate back to the proper position to adjust your sight for the astigmatism.

Symptoms

• The most common symptom of astigmatism is blurred vision. This can be a fairly slight to quite severe blurring. You may also experience a certain amount of distortion in your line of vision. This will usually only affect just a segment of your eyesight, since it will be in relation to the imperfection in the curve of your cornea. Many times, people will also suffer headaches, more so as a result to eyestrain as the eye tries to adjust a person's sight.

Causes

• More often than not, you were born with your astigmatism, and it has just worsened over time. This decline, so to speak, may be due to the lighting by which you tend to read, the distance between your eyes and a computer screen or a television screen, another vision problem that has caused you to squint and other potential reasons. It may also be a result of a trauma to the eye itself or a surgery to correct a vision issue.

Treatment

• If you have astigmatism, you'll most likely be fitted with a pair of glass or contact lenses to correct your visual problems. When you opt for contacts, they'll be either hard or soft lenses, which is a relatively new development. Years ago, the only kind of contact lenses that could treat astigmatism were of the hard variety, since this type of lens basically stays in place (it doesn't rotate upon blinking as seen in the soft lenses). Now that there are toric lenses that rotate back to the appropriate position to adjust your eyesight, people can use soft lenses for their astigmatisms.