Can we prevent age-related vision loss? The short answer is no. It’s part of the human condition. It’s a result of the crystalline lens inside the eye hardening up on its journey to becoming a cataract. Initially, it loses its flexibility, and we all start to experience that frustration of not being able to shift focus from distance to near. You start to hold things a little bit further away and further away.

You ask someone to hold things out for you, or you put your reading specs on. Then the lens continues on its journey, and the optical quality starts to become compromised, as it goes a little bit cloudy and then it starts to turn into a cataract. Again a gradual change.

It makes sense to follow all the other health advice that we’re told because it also applies to your eyes. If you smoke, you will accelerate the ageing changes in the crystalline lens can turn into a cataract more rapidly. There isn’t so much evidence to back it up, but it does make sense that if you don’t smoke, you eat the right foods and look after yourself that you can delay the onset of cataract. It is just like grey hair, wrinkles and stiffening of joints. It’s an integral part of the ageing process. It’s something that will happen, it’s a right of passage, and the only question is, when does it start to affect your quality of life?

For most of us, presbyopia, the loss of range of focuses, is in our forties maybe early fifties, if you’re lucky. For cataract symptoms, for most of us: sixties and seventies. For some people, it can be in their forties that the quality of vision starts be compromised, and they benefit from lens replacement or cataract surgery.