A study funded by America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found that children who wore special contact lenses to slow progression of myopia maintained the treatment benefit after they stopped wearing the contacts as older teens.
A NIH media release said controlling myopia progression in childhood can help to potentially decrease the risks of vision-threatening myopia complications later in life, such as retinal detachment and glaucoma.
“Rates of myopia have been increasing in recent years with some implications that higher use of personal devices plays a role,” the release said.
“There was concern that the eye might grow faster than normal when myopia-control contact lenses were discontinued,” said principal investigator, Dr David A. Berntsen, chair of clinical sciences at the University of Houston College of Optometry.
But the new study showed that axial eye growth returned to age-expected rates. While there was a small increase (0.03 mm/year) in eye growth across all age groups after discontinuing multifocal lenses, the overall rate of eye growth was no different than the age-expected rate.
“Our findings show that when older teenagers stopped wearing these lenses, the eye returned to the age-expected rate of growth,” said Dr Berntsen.
The new study follows an original clinical trial that showed soft contact lenses designed to add high focusing power to one’s peripheral vision, as well as correction for distance vision, were most effective at slowing the rate of eye growth, decreasing how myopic children became.
Participants in the follow-up study wore high-add lenses for two years, followed by single-vision contact lenses for the third year of the study to see if the benefit remained after discontinuing treatment.
Participants who had been in the original study high-add multifocal treatment group continued to have shorter eyes and less myopia at the end of the follow-up study, the release said.
Children who were switched to high-add multifocal contact lenses for the first time during the follow-up study did not catch up to those who had worn high-add lenses since the start of the original clinical trial when they were 7 to 11 years of age.
“Our findings suggest that it’s a reasonable strategy to fit children with multifocal contact lenses for myopia control at a younger age and continue treatment until the late teenage years when myopia progression has slowed,” said follow-up study chair, Dr Jeffrey J. Walline, associate dean for research at the Ohio State University College of Optometry, Columbus.
Single vision prescription glasses and contact lenses can correct myopic vision, but they fail to treat the underlying problem, which is the eye continuing to grow longer than normal. By contrast, soft multifocal contact lenses correct myopic vision in children while simultaneously slowing myopia progression by slowing eye growth.
The study, known as the Bifocal Lenses In Nearsighted Kids (BLINK), and follow-on study, known as BLINK2 published their findings in JAMA Ophthalmology.
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