How many people in the US wear: 1)prescription eyeglasses (for
distance and/or astygmatism), 2)sunglasses?

 I am not interested in contact lens or reading glasses wearers. 

 If this info is available broken down into age groups, that would be
helpful

Dear LizW,

I found the following information in industry reports.  [indicates the
source]

How many people in the US wear: 1)prescription eyeglasses (for
distance and/or astygmatism),
[1]
126 million Americans only wear eyeglasses
35 million Americans wear contact leses (and could also wear eye
glasses)

2)sunglasses?

[2] ~90 million Americans wear sunglasses 
 
If this info is available broken down into age groups, that would be
helpful 

I could not find this information.

Sources:
[1] Eyeglass and Contact Lense Market in the USA, Euromonitor, 2002
[2] Optical Retailing, Medical & Healthcare Marketplace Guide, 1998

Also, this is an associated website.
http://www.sunglassassociation.com/

I hope this is what you were looking for, 
claudietta

I found a pretty old report from the Centers for Disease Control that
has some, but not all of the detail you're after on glasses....good
luck on the sunglasses data.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/series/sr_10/sr10_145.pdf

Use of eyeglasses and contact lenses

"Household respondents during 1979 and 1980 were asked
whether each person in the family, at the present time, wore
eyeglasses or contact lenses. Hence, the statistics presented
on the use of corrective lenses are average annual estimates
for 1979-80 for the U.S. civilian noninstitutionalized population.
. Of the 207.1 million persons ages 3 and over, a total
of 107.1 million (51.7 percent) wore either eyeglasses
or contact lenses (table 8).
. The wearing of some type of corrective lenses was related
to age, gender, race, Hispanic origin, education of head
of family, education of individual, geographic region,
family income, and occupational status.
. A total of 9.3 million (4.5 percent) persons ages 3 and
over wore contact lenses in 1979-80.
. The wearing of contact lenses was also related to age,
gender, race, Hispanic origin, education of head of family,
education of individual, geographic region, family
income, and occupational status.


For your information, the title of Table 8 is Number of persons in
population and percent of persons 3 years of age and over with
corrective lenses, by type of lens, sex, and age.  The table shows
that 47.2% of Americans were wearing glasses at the time of the
survey.  Other tables provide breakdowns by race, education level,
geography, age, and so on.

Hope this helps.