A NEW optometrist treatment allows short-sighted eye problems to be fixed while you sleep, with the treatment also suitable for children.

Abandoning your glasses and sleeping off short-sightedness is not what an optometrist normally advocates.

But one expert is doing just that herself to test a novel treatment.

Laura Reece, an award-winning optometrist in Hereford, is using a system of vision correction called Ortho-k.

By wearing bespoke-made contact lenses each night as she sleeps, Laura’s cornea is gently flattened to provide perfect vision for the day ahead.

Laura said: “My uncorrected vision is -2.25 dioptres, with some astigmatism, so sufficient for me to be wearing glasses all the time, but with this overnight system I wake up to good vision: it is brilliant.”

Ortho-k involves the optometrist taking detailed topographical maps of the cornea, captured in seconds in a painless scan which provides thousands of reference points. From these the personalised lenses are produced.

The gentle pressure of the eyelid each night changes the shape of the cornea by a fraction of a hair’s width – all that is needed to provide good vision.

Laura now recommends this to suitable patients at the practice, BBR Optometry in St Owen's Street.

She added: “We have plenty of young people, especially those who play a lot of sport, who like to use this form of vision correction, leaving them free of glasses and daily wear contact lenses.

"Many of our junior patients are using Ortho-k as it has been shown in a number of international studies to arrest the progression of myopia in children."

The Association of Optometrists has recently issued guidelines to the optical profession on the subject of myopia – or short-sightedness - in children which is raising some alarm.

The incidence of myopia in children has doubled in the past 50 years and children are being affected at a younger age, but Ortho-k is proving to be a successful way to stop the progression for many youngsters.

The great advantage of this is that children are free of glasses and daily contact lenses all day with care of their lenses and hygiene issues left at home, perhaps with parental supervision.

Successful wearers of Ortho-k now range from children as young as eight through to octogenarians who find dry eye is an issue with daily contact lens wear, but not by wearing these lenses as they sleep.