This article groups common clinical treatments in an effort to explore what we do and don’t know regarding myopia control efficacy. It highlights the need to balance the available evidence with emerging knowledge when discussing options for myopia control with patients and their carers.
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.
With over 10,000 attendees and thousands of research posters, papers and symposiums presented over 5 days, it was a mind blowing nerdy extravaganza. Here are a bunch of cutting edge research pieces which I posted to the Myopia Profile Facebook group at the time.
Three more fascinating areas and/or pieces of research presented at IMC, and some bonus material.
Center-distance soft multifocal contact lenses have been shown to slow the progression of myopia,1-5 but practitioners around the world are concerned about the vision produced by soft multifocal contact lens wear in children.
This blog retraces my personal journey into myopia control and explains why I believe that this is the most important development for optometry that has taken place during my career.
This experimental design was primarily based on the peripheral retinal blur theory, that E. Smith developed,1 providing an incremental, progressive, refractive change from the central visual axis to peripheral retina, reaching a +2.00D add plus power at about 35 degrees of retinal eccentricity and achieving about +6.00D of addition plus power at the edge of the optical zone (4mm semichord diameter).
Myopia control is complex. But for me, to be successful it needs to be performed with a customized lens geared toward the individual.
After attending the BCLA Myopia Management Day, I got to thinking about how industry will respond to the conference highlights. There was much discussion about new optical designs which may emerge in the coming years.
