Astigmatism : The Hurdle to Perfect Vision

Dr Sam Schneider • August 27, 2020

Stigma? Stigmata? No no. Astigmatism.

Everyone’s heard about astigmatism, but what actually is it? Well, once it's differentiated from its other misnomers, we can learn a bit about it!

Astigmatism isn’t a scary disease, it's actually quite common! It refers to how light bends when it comes into the eye. Because the eye is generally a spherical shaped structure, if it’s not perfectly spherical, then light scatters when it comes into the eye. This leads to starburst effect on lights and shadowing of objects in our vision (sound familiar?). In a nutshell, this is astigmatism!

Astigmatism comes from two structures in the eye:

The cornea – the front surface of the eye. If this is a bit steeper along one meridian, then we’d call it corneal astigmatism. Some people have been told their eyes are shaped like a rugby ball rather than soccer ball, which is certainly one way to think about it!

The lens – housed inside the eye is a lens that does a lot of our focussing. This too can have an unequal curvature to it which can scatter light. We call this lenticular astigmatism.

So how do we correct astigmatism?

With glasses or contact lenses!

There are certain situations where one works better than the other, but generally speaking, astigmatism is easily corrected and is quite stable. So, if you have blurry vision or you've been told you have astigmatism, we can find the best solution for your eyes!