These data provide reassurance to eye care practitioners concerned with the phenomenon of "myopic creep." Soft contact lens wear by children does not cause a clinically relevant increase in axial length, corneal curvature, or myopia relative to spectacle lens wear. (ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT00522288.).
Contact lenses significantly improved the quality of life, as reported by children and teens using the PREP, and there was not a difference in improvement between children and teens. Contact lens wear dramatically improves how children and teens feel about their appearance and participation in activities, leading to greater satisfaction with their refractive error correction. The improvement in quality of life after contact lens wear indicates that children should be offered contact lenses as a treatment for refractive error as routinely as teens.
Even contemporary contact lens wear can have a small but measurable impact on the precorneal tear film osmolality or volume. The changes are internally consistent and, overall, support the idea that the PRT test provides a useful measure of tear meniscus volume.
The total chair time for children is approximately 15 min longer than teens, but most of that difference is explained by longer time spent teaching children insertion and removal. Because insertion and removal is generally taught by staff members, the eye care practitioner's time with the patient is similar between children and teens. Furthermore, neither children nor teens experienced problems related to contact lens wear during the study. Eye care practitioners should consider routinely offering contact lenses as a treatment option, even for children 8 years old.
The efficacy of the model used in this study was verified through direct comparison of the modeled and measured data. UV-blocking hydrogel soft contact lenses reduce the MED to the human eye and therefore limit the lifetime ocular dose. These lenses are highly recommended to prevent the development of UVR-related ocular pathologic conditions.
Myopia reduction after 1 week was clinically insignificant from the 1-month results, indicating that the full effect is achieved by 1 week. Neither total nor epithelial corneal thickness varied significantly from baseline measurements.
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