Specsavers Ballincollig taking a deeper look into your eyes

Specsavers Ballincollig has invested in hospital-quality equipment that can help detect treatable eye conditions sooner. The Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) scanner is a cutting-edge piece of equipment that allows opticians to view the eye in more detail than ever before. Helping to detect a number of eye conditions, such as age-related macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy, sooner, an OCT can also help to detect glaucoma up to four years in advance. Given that nearly half of all sight loss is preventable, an OCT scan means conditions can be managed before they get worse and can help prevent potential sight loss. An OCT scan, which only takes a few seconds, uses light to take more than 1,000 images of the back of your eye and beyond, looking right back to the optic nerve and creating a cross-section view. Imagine it like a cake – you can see the top of the cake and the icing, but the image produced from an OCT scan slices the cake in half and turns it on its side, so you can see all the layers inside. It gives your optician an incredibly accurate picture of your eye and its structures. Speaking about the state-of-the-art optical technology, store director at Specsavers Ballincollig, Deirdre Moore, comments: ‘This innovative technology gives our opticians the ability to enhance the offering for customers by identifying and helping to detect or manage conditions. OCT technology produces such a detailed picture of the structures in the eye that it allows us to identify signs of diseases years earlier than traditional methods. Given that 75% of vision impairment and blindness can be prevented, the sooner we can detect these conditions, the sooner we can help manage them or refer people for treatment.’ The scan is in addition to a thorough eye test, during which the optometrist uses a range of clinical tests and procedures to measure the quality of someone’s vision and the health of their eyes. A customer’s OCT images are stored on file, so Specsavers optometrists can note any changes over time – a real benefit when monitoring someone’s overall eye health. OCT is now available in Specsavers Ballincollig. For more information on the services available or to make an appointment, call the expert team on 021 2344400 or visit www.specsavers.ie/stores/ballincollig.

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