It’s Presbyopia Awareness Month and Alcon is on a mission to educate consumers about a condition that is expected to impact 123 million U.S. residents by 2020. Presbyopia is a natural part of aging that usually happens around age 40. However, new survey findings from Alcon show this common condition has a name people often do not recognize, symptoms they do not understand, and a lack of knowledge of vision correction options other than reading glasses that many see as inconvenient.

This month, Alcon is launching Project Presbyopia, an ongoing effort to educate consumers about how to recognize signs and symptoms of vision changes that occur after age 40, uncover more intuitive language for the condition, and motivate existing and emerging presbyopes to visit an Eye Care Professional to explore solutions including multifocal contact lenses. The initiative is inspired by crowd-sourced findings and surveys of presbyopes and ECPs that uncovered the name “presbyopia” isn’t the only point of confusion for consumers.

Some survey findings include:

• The eye doctors surveyed report that most of their patients don’t understand what the word presbyopia means (92%) and some ECPs either avoid using the term altogether (39%) or use it along with other descriptive words when explaining the condition to patients (59%).

• While 46% of the consumers surveyed say they just cope with their presbyopia and use different methods to help them see, 67% want to stop adjusting their lives around their vision as it relates to their reading glasses.

Click HERE for more highlights from the survey findings and the full press release.