Articulo Cientifico

Article scientific

A contact lens is a corrective, cosmetic, or therapeutic lens usually placed on the cornea of the eye. Leonardo da Vinci is credited with describing and sketching the first ideas for contact lenses in 1508, but it was more than 300 years later before contact lenses were actually fabricated and worn on the eye. Modern soft contact lenses were invented by the Czech chemist Otto Wichterle and his assistant Drahoslav Lím, who also invented the first gel used for their production.

Contact lenses usually serve the same corrective purpose as glasses, but are lightweight and virtually invisible—many commercial lenses are tinted a faint blue to make them more visible when immersed in cleaning and storage solutions. Some cosmetic lenses are deliberately colored to alter the appearance of the eye. Some lenses now have a thin surface treatment which is a UV coating; this helps to reduce UV damage to the eye's natural lens.

It has been estimated that 125 million people use contact lenses worldwide (2%), including 28 to 38 million in the United States and 13 million in Japan. The types of lenses used and prescribed vary markedly between countries, with rigid lenses accounting for over 20% of currently-prescribed lenses in Japan, the Netherlands and Germany but less than 5% in Scandinavia.

People choose to wear contact lenses for many reasons, often due to their appearance and practicality. When compared with spectacles, contact lenses are less affected by wet weather, do not steam up, and provide a wider field of vision. They are more suitable for a number of sporting activities. Additionally, ophthalmological conditions such as keratoconus and aniseikonia may not be accurately corrected with glasses.

* HISTORY:

* Leonardo Da Vinci → 1508 Codex of the eye, Manual D

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In 1888, Adolf Fick was apparently the first to successfully fit contact lenses, which were made from blown glass

René Descartes → proposed another idea in 1636, in which a glass tube filled with liquid is placed in direct contact with the cornea.

* In 1801 → Thomas Young constructed a liquid-filled "eyecup" which could be considered a predecessor to the contact lens.

* Sir John Herschel → 1845 edition of the Encyclopedia Metropolitan, posed two ideas for the visual correction:

* The first "a spherical capsule of glass filled with animal jelly", and "a mould of the cornea" which could be impressed on "some sort of transparent medium".

* Dr. Dallos →1929 perfected a method of making molds from living eyes. This enabled the manufacture of lenses that, for the first time, conformed to the actual shape of the eye.

* 1887 → F.E. Muller, produced the first eye covering to be seen through and tolerated.

* 1887, → the German ophthalmologist

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