“How do I know if my contacts are old?”

Throw them away as per the factory recommendations and the FDA approval for that lens.

If you are wearing contact lenses, it's really important that you follow your eye care professional's recommendation on both contact lens maintenance and wearing schedule. If you wear monthly soft contacts over the recommended 30 days, then you may feel irritated and blurry vision due to protein deposits on the contact lenses. You may also notice that the soft contact lenses are more rigid/harder than normal when you wear them, which may indicate an older soft contact lens.

When in doubt, swap them out. Not worth getting an eye infection, allergies or dry eye. In fact, daily, single-use contacts are commonly the healthiest option for your eyes (if you’re a candidate and your prescription qualifies.

To assure healthy eyes, comfort, and clear vision contact lenses should be replaced as recommended by your eye doctor as not all contacts are a monthly replacement.

Dry eye symptoms are common after lasik. Your doctor should have informed you of this possible problem. Artificial tears can help alievate your dry eye symptoms.

Great question. Generally, any redness, pain or change in vision should immediately be evaluated by your eye doctor, regardless the age of the lens. In addition, wearing any contact lens beyond the FDA recommended guideline can have immediate risk and jeopardize long term eye health. The brain has been shown to often trigger symptoms of eye irritation well after the eye is actually stressed. Because of this symptom lag, an eye doctor will never recommend changing out a lens when it ‘feels’ like it needs changed. By the time the eye “feels’ like it’s time to change the contact, the patient is at risk for a number of problems, including contact lens intolerance, neovascularization, keratitis, and corneal ulceration, which can be sight threatening if a scar occurs within the line of vision. My advice is to strictly adhere to your doctors recommended wear schedule.

Ideally, one way to mitigate many risks of overwear is to just switch to dailies, where the lens is replaced each day. This is a very healthy, very comfortable and now a very affordable modality of wear. In our practice, almost 70% of patients wear dailies as the costs are now comparable to monthlies and even cheaper than most 2 week lenses.

Regardless of wear or tear on your contacts you should be changing your contacts out monthly if they are monthly contact lenses. Many optometrist are switching patients to daily wear contacts for cleanliness and clarity of vision and comfort.

Each type of lens is approved by the FDA for a given replacement schedule. In addition to this, a doctor may alter the replacement recommendations for each particular patient. This may be anywhere from one day to one year. Without seeing the lens on your eye under a microscope, it would be difficult to say what your particular schedule should be. Your eyes should be checked annually to assure the lens fits well, is clean, and is not causing damage to the eyes.

You don’t want to wait till you signs of discomfort. Should follow the doctor’s recommendation about the daily hours if wear and the okay as to when to discard.

Wearing contacts longer than approved increases risk of infection and damage to your eye. Unfortunately there is often no warning signs until the infection or problems arrive.

You will feel discomfort, maybe some blurriness in vision, too.