If your child has myopia, special lenses can reduce its advancement
By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
Of course, prescribed contact lenses help wearers see better. But MiSight Lens, an FDA-approved soft, daily disposable lens, can help children slow the progression of myopia, commonly called nearsightedness. Rochester-based CooperVision manufactures the lenses.
The lenses are approved for children aged 8-12, the time of peak progression for myopia.
“Often, depending on the degree of myopia, you can use them at any time or age,” said Marc Deeley, optometrist and contact lens specialist with Rochester Regional Health.
He explained that with nearsightedness, light rays focus in front of the retina. Glasses or contacts decrease the power of the eye and bring light to the retina for distance vision. The standard soft lenses create a flat plane of power.
“There’s one power in the lens to bring light to the retina,” Deeley said. “The issue with that with pediatric patients is the globe is round and the retina is round. In the periphery of the eye, you have light that focuses behind the retina. The eye views those areas as blurry, which stimulates continued eye growth. That’s when prescription starts getting worse.”
The MiSight lens offers a dual focus optic design with concentric rings of power throughout the lens, one for nearsightedness and the others for treatment. The treatment zones operate in a similar way to a multi-focal lens.
“They take the peripheral light that was focused behind the retina and create light in front of the retina and decrease stimulus for further eye growth while maintaining good visual acuity,” Deeley said. “It’s creating a power plane that matches the shape of the eye itself. The cool part of this by implementing this lens in patients 8-12, it decreases the progression of nearsightedness by 59%. Forty-one percent of those eyes had no progression at all over the course of three years.”
Typically, providers keep patients in the lens throughout puberty or until there are no signs of progression and then discuss taking them off those lenses and fitting them with standard contact lenses.
Although transitioning from glasses to contact lenses used to represent another teenager rite of passage, Deeley said that the younger children do a good job of handling and cleaning their lenses and he has experienced no problem with these young lens wearers.
Letting myopia progress unchecked can lead to problems. Deeley listed those as early detached retina, glaucoma, cataracts, floaters “and other conditions that can be devastating.”
Another newer lens innovation is multifocal lenses for adults that provide near vision.
As contact lens technology progresses, they will continue to provide new benefits to wearers.
“There are considerations for using contacts for glucose monitoring or medication release,” Deeley said. “These may be in the pipelines. There’s a whole other realm of specialty contact lenses for treating eye diseases.
“There are a lot of advances in scleral lenses; they’re developed to be fully customized to the patient based on their eye shape and who have eye conditions that limit them from wearing standard contact lenses.”
Scleral lenses extend to cover part of the white of the eye.