This case is not your typical astigmatic myope. There are several features to this patient that require careful consideration, including high myopia, amblyopia, myopia correction and control, and eye health management.
Myopia progression graphs, tools and apps are an excellent visual display. But how reliable are these calculators for your patient?
Welcome to Part 2 of the news update of the 2020 Global Specialty Lens Symposium, held in Las Vegas. Read on for updates on the risk-to-benefit comparison of myopia control, how to talk myopia successfully with parents and how to integrate myopia control into your practice.
We all know that high myopia is associated with higher incidences of retinal detachment, glaucoma and myopic maculopathy1. Instigating early, evidence based myopia control in rapidly progressing myopes gives the best outcomes both pathophysiologically and refractively. However when faced with a low, slower progressing myope, or a patient whom has already progressed is there any point in persisting with myopia control?
We’re excited to release our new clear, concise and clinically relevant infographic Which option to slow myopia?to help you with what we have learnt is the main practitioner need in myopia management, and the most popular discussion topic in the Myopia Profile Facebook group – guidance in selecting the right treatment for your patient. A world first, evidence based decision making tool.
Most eye care practitioners don’t routinely measure axial length in clinical practice, mainly due to lack of access to the instrumentation and its expense. This is not the only reason, though, that axial length (AXL) measurement is a bit of a problematic measure for gauging myopia management success in a clinical setting.
When selecting an optical treatment for myopia management, contact lens options appear to be the most consistent, with OrthoK and multifocal soft contact lenses offering around a 50% efficacy for controlling refractive and axial change in myopia.1 And it’s not just the important benefit of modifying lifelong risk of vision impairment through successful myopia control which should be top of mind – contact lens wear for myopic children can offer significant immediate benefits to their self-perception and satisfaction with vision correction.
A key barrier to contact lens wear in children is parental and practitioner concern about safety. The research indicates, though, that children may be the safest contact lens wearers – here we describe the statistics and how to approach clinical communication.
Let’s cut to the chase – until further notice, you can consider low dose (0.05%) atropine, soft multifocal CL’s and OrthoK as all quite similar in terms of their myopia control efficacy, being around 50% on average. A network meta-analysis of sixteen different interventions studied for myopia control showed these options to all have similar efficacy when their refractive and axial length outcomes were put on a level playing field.
We have a convincing evidence base for several optical, one pharmacological and visual environment solutions to reduce the progression of childhood myopia, but nothing guarantees 100% efficacy. Because of this, even in when under a successful myopia management strategy, a child’s myopia may still progress.
