Originally Posted by
ION 16
Anyone out there have any experience of maintaining a class 1 here in the UK once your eyesight exceeds the limits?
I have had a UK class 1 for many years and have always been rather long sighted. As I approach middle age I now have the onset of presbyopia (age related long sight) on top of my already long sight which has caused my uncorrected vision to become much worse. I now sit at the limit of +5.00 diopters in each eye so no doubt over the next few years I will exceed that limit.
I can still achieve excellent vision with spectacles and have no underlying pathology. Anyone out there have any experience of maintaining a class 1 here in the UK once your eyesight exceeds the limits? Is it possible?
I might be wrong on this (so I hope someone can confirm that) but even though presbyopia is called age related long sight is has technically nothing to do with correction required for distant vision and I think it's only the latter on which the current limit is applied. As long as your hyperopia doesn't change you should still have the same distant vision with the correction you currently have and presbyopia would only lead to problems when trying to read something rather close to your eyes.
So I would assume nothing changes for your medical except - when your presbyopia leads to poor near vision - you might require glasses to correct for that.
However, as I said, I'm in no way an expert, just someone having almost the same problem (+5.00 but not yet developing presbyopia), so I tried to gather as much information as possible about this.