Keratoconus is an eye disease that most people have never heard of. But chances are, if you’re reading this, you have not only heard of it, but you or someone you love may have it. That means that you’re also looking for a solution to see clearly with Keratoconus (also known as KC). While some doctors promote various kinds of surgery for Keratoconus, we strongly believe that the best treatment for most patients is a non-surgical Keratoconus treatment using specialized contact lenses. Many other Optometrists and Ophthalmologists agree, but they have difficulty creating Keratoconus Lenses that fit well enough for the patient to see well and wear them all day. At the California Keratoconus Center, we have created techniques for creating better-fitting Keratoconus Lenses for our patients that often bring tears of joy to their eyes.

What Is Keratoconus

Keratoconus is usually a progressive disease that results in a misshapen cornea. Since light passes through the cornea before entering the lens, vision is distorted, much like if you were looking through a cut-crystal drinking glass. With many other eye conditions, such as far-sightedness or near-sightedness, light behaves the same no matter where on the eye it enters. However, with Keratoconus, light enters the cornea from different angles and then goes off in different directions through the lens. This often causes glare, ghosting, starbursts, night vision problems and other symptoms, collectively called High Order Aberrations and are exceptionally difficult to treat.

Treating Keratoconus With Contact Lenses

And because Keratoconus results in peaks and valleys on the cornea, it can’t be treated successfully with conventional lenses. Placing such a lens on a cornea with Keratoconus is much like placing a saucer on top of an upturned tea cup. It will wobble, not stay in place, and when the patient blinks, it will often irritate the eye and eyelid because the lid will rub on the edge of the lens. This results in red eyes, dry eyes, and the inability of the patient to wear the lenses all day long.

More importantly, conventional lenses are a poor treatment for Keratoconus because they don’t stay in place on the eye. Due to the complex topography (peaks and valleys) of a cornea with KC, the lens must have different kinds of correction at every point on the lens, and a conventional lens just can’t be made to do this reliably and with much success.

Unfortunately, many Eye Doctors not trained to diagnose or treat Keratoconus will still try to prescribe conventional lenses for moderate to severe Keratoconus — including soft lenses or toric hard lenses — resulting in poor vision, irritated eyes and extreme frustration for the patient.

Better Fitting Keratoconus Lenses

While we sometimes use Rigid Gas Permeable Lenses or Soft Contact Lenses for mild Keratoconus, for everything else, we design better-fitting Keratoconus lenses by using Scleral Lenses. But that’s only part of the story. How we diagnose your Keratoconus and design your lenses are the real keys to our success and your better vision.

What Are Scleral Lenses?

Scleral lenses differ from conventional lenses because they are designed to not only cover the lens and iris, but to extend far onto the “sclera”, which is the white part of the eye. This allows us to design lenses that vault over the cornea — the part of the eye that is oddly shaped in Keratoconus patients — and rest on the sclera. And because the sclera is uniquely shaped on every eye, we can design our scleral lenses to fit precisely on the sclera and not move, much like a saddle sits firmly on a horse.

Extremely Precise Diagnosis and Prescriptions

The California Keratoconus Center is a technology leader for Keratoconus Lenses. Our diagnostics area is filled with the most advanced technology available for precisely viewing and measuring eyes and vision. In fact, some Eye Doctors have commented that our technology is far more advanced than that of many large eye institutes or large commercial eye care companies.

We are not only users of this technology but also work with the manufacturers and their scientists to improve the technology and train other Eye Doctors who are trying to improve their skills. One piece of technology that is central to our better-fitting Keratoconus lenses is the Eaglet Eye Surface Profiler, a device that can map 350,000 points on an eye. This device helps us arrive at a precise diagnosis, which we can then show you (in 3D fully rotating images).

We combine this precise mapping of your eye with our 30+ years of experience in treating Keratoconus to design a lens that — thinking back to the cut crystal glass — has a different prescription at each point of your eye, correcting the vision at that point. We can only do this because we know that the scleral lens will not move or rotate on the eye and that every prescription on that lens will be over the exact right spot on your cornea to provide you excellent vision.

The lenses we design for you will be from one of several high-quality lens laboratories, including Bostonsight, ZenLens, and ScanFitPro. We have relationships with these labs and others so that they will work with us to provide a better-fitting, perfectly-fitting scleral lens for your Keratoconus.

First Fit Success

When we design and fit Keratoconus lenses for our patients, we’re not done until you, the patient, are happy with both the fit and the vision. We measure our first-fit success rate, and while conventional methods of designing Keratoconus Lenses can result in a first-fit success less than one-third of the time, our first-fit success rate for Scleral Lenses is 52%, and our second-fit success rate is 85% — and it is going up all the time.

Get Your Own Better Fitting Keratoconus Lenses

There’s really no secret formula to what we do to create better-fitting Keratoconus lenses for our patients. If you would like to experience it for yourself, make an appointment with the California Keratoconus Center. You can either make your appointment online or call us at 818-891-6711.