One of Australia’s first optometrists to begin prescribing relatively new orthokeratology (orthoK) lens technology from Menicon has detailed the impact it’s having at a clinical level.
Ms Heidi Hunter, clinical optometrist at Custom Eyecare in Newcastle, has been fitting orthoK lenses for 10 years and recently started offering Menicon Alpha Ortho-k, which first became available in Australia in February 2020.
According to Menicon, orthoK has become an increasingly popular treatment for children and young adults who want to be glasses-free – especially those who play contact sports or work in environments that become problematic for spectacle-wearers.
Designed and manufactured in Japan for people with mild to moderate myopia, Alpha Ortho-k is described as a highly oxygen-permeable hard contact lens. It is specially designed to effectively and safely correct myopia by flattening the anterior surface of the cornea when the lens is worn during sleep.
It consists of four zone five curves and offers flexibility for practitioners to adjust the lens parameters, including the back optic zone diameter to enhance myopia correction effects, especially for patients who suffer from glare and halo.
“Dealing with Angelo Doumbos at Menicon has been fabulous, the technical support has been great, customer support has been great. Their ordering system is very user-friendly which is a big plus for me. And the patients’ feedback from Menicon orthoK lenses has been that they are very comfortable,” Hunter said.
“The lenses we’ve been using from Menicon are done with trial fitting. We’ve been popping the patient in a diagnostic lens, and they sit with their eyes closed while wearing the lenses for somewhere between 20 minutes to an hour, and that serves the patient a lot of benefits.”
Hunter added that even after such a short time of trial, patients already get to experience the “magic effects” the lens is capable of.
“When we remove that lens, we can retake their maps and you can actually see that it has already started to gently reshape the cornea, and also the patient has had an improvement in their vision,” she said.
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