There are numerous reasons why contact lenses are beneficial for children, and the safety profile is high. Yet there are still barriers in the mind of the practitioner, parent and young patient to childhood CL wear. Here we address these often cited barriers, with the goal to support your clinical communication on the benefits and safety of contact lenses for kids, to move towards achieving a ‘yes’ from the parent and patient.
There’s a common clinical belief that orthokeratology doesn’t work as well in lower myopes for myopia control. This is even sometimes included in conference presentations as prescribing advice. Is orthokeratology useful for control of low myopia? Here’s what’s fact and what’s fiction, when considering its efficacy for low vs high myopia, and orthokeratology vs multifocal contact lens myopia control.
When it comes to contact lens corrections for young myopes, the impact of orthokeratology (OK) and multifocal soft contact lenses (MFSCL) on binocular vision is pertinent to visual comfort and understanding mechanisms of myopia progression and control.
Changing a myope from spectacle to contact lens wear can alter their binocular vision (BV) function. The myope reading through their spectacles experiences base-in prism at near, as demonstrated in the image above, which moves the image further away and decreases vergence demand.
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.
What causes myopic progression? Studies have attempted to find causative factors related to genetic, environmental, and behavioral influences including parental myopia, time spent outdoors, and hours of near work (reading, computer, video games).1
Two meta-analysis papers were published in the first half of 2015, both from Chinese research groups. Meta-analysis requires specifying a search criteria which is then followed over a set period of time to include all papers and reports that are caught by the search criteria terms.
Scientific data increasingly points towards contact lenses as our best option for myopia control. Does the risk of orthok outweigh the benefits for kids?
