contact lens focus

A Natural Eye Lens

One-day SiHy lens provides comfort similar to the natural eye.

BRAD S. GIEDD, O.D., M.S., F.A.A.O.

Discomfort and inconvenience are the primary reasons for contact lens dropout. As a result, contact lens manufacturers are constantly looking for ways to make their products more comfortable and convenient to use. Vistakon hopes to accomplish this with its 1-Day Acu-vue TruEye Brand Contact Lenses — silicone hydrogel daily disposables that received FDA market clearance this past June.

My practice was one of the independent research sites used in multiple clinical trials for the lens. Here, I explain why I think Vistakon has an excellent chance of accomplishing this goal.

Comfort

The 1-Day Acuvue TruEye Brand Contact Lens is comprised of narafilcon B silicone hydrogel material, providing the cornea with oxygen permeability, and Hydra-clear 1, an improved formulation of the company's proprietary Hydr-aclear technology, which combines high performance base materials with a moisture-rich wetting agent.

Multiple clinical trials on the lens revealed that the combination of these two components results in a minimal impact of the lens on the ocular surface, and therefore, improved comfort.

In fact, in an ongoing, one-year, 94-subject prospective randomized masked parallel group study comparing these lens wearers with patients who have never worn contact lenses, 1-Day Acuvue TruEye Brand Contact Lenses had no significant effect on the ocular surface as compared with non-contact lens wearers on five out of six contact lens-related measures linked with eye health after one month of wear. These measures: conjunctival hy-peremia, limbal hyperemia, cor-neal staining, tar sal conjunctival health, corneal vascularization and conjunctival staining. Conjunctival staining wasn't statistically significant. As expected, the contact-lens wearing group exhibited greater conjunctival staining vs. the non-contact lens-wearing group. The study has also thus far shown that the lens provides high comfort levels from morning to night, which is comparable to non-lens wear.

In addition to the materials' comfort features, the lens' one-day modality makes it inherently comfortable. In other words, inserting a fresh lens daily helps to decrease protein or allergen accumulation on the lens, and because it's a one-day lens it precludes patients from having to contend with sensitivity to solutions. These reasons make the 1-Day Acuvue TruEye Brand Contact Lenses a good choice for patients who struggle with lens-related dryness, in particular.

For example, a patient in her late 30s presented considering dropping out of lens wear, as she struggled for years with dryness from an array of frequent replacement lenses and lens solutions. When she tried the 1-Day Acuvue TruEye Brand Contact Lenses in one of the Vistakon clinical trials, however, she said she was very pleased with the comfort the lens provided. In fact, many of my patients who participated in these trials expressed interest in the lens once it became commercially available.

Convenience

Because the 1-Day Acuvue Tru-Eye Brand Contact Lens doesn't require a lens care regimen, patients find it's a very convenient modality. Such patients include those who don't have the time to comply with a lens care regimen (e.g. workaholics, parents of young children, etc.), and those who don't want to interrupt their activities, such as sports and social events, to comply. The latter makes children and young adults, in particular, great candidates for this modality.

Further, patients who tried the lens said they greatly appreciated the convenience of its handling during both insertion and removal.

Because the 1-Day Acuvue TruEye Brand Contact Lenses offer comfort comparable to non-lens wear and provide convenient characteristics, such as no lens-care regiment, they have an excellent chance of dissuading patients from dropping out of contact lens wear. Further, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that these lenses block more that 96% of UV-A rays and 99% of UV-B rays that reach the lens — another attractive characteristic for patients, particularly those who live in sunny environments year-round like the sunshine state. OM