Further Research Needed To Make Daily Disposables Perfect

The future holds many possibilities for contact lenses, including ways to treat eye diseases by delivering medication or serving as miniature displays for real-time health information. However, the focus at present is to create the perfect contact lens for purely vision correction purposes. This means developing a lens that effectively does its job without being noticed by the patient. Research conducted by Australia’s Brien Holden Vision Institute has shown that daily disposable contact lenses appear to be pretty close to the comfort ideal, but more work is needed to take the lenses to a level where dryness and discomfort are totally foreign concepts.

At present, over 70% of lens wearers report that there are moments when they experience dryness and discomfort while wearing their contacts. This can have a negative impact on wearing times and even lead some patients to give up on lenses altogether.

Brien Holden Vision Institute’s research was conducted by Dr Percy Lazon de la Jara, who is in charge of clinical research at the institute. His studies involved 183 daily disposable lens wearers and 40 people who wore no vision correction aids at all, over a period of three months. When the subjects’ responses were analysed, the results showed that daily disposable contacts were associated with very low levels of ocular complications, but comfort and dryness levels remained significantly below those experienced by non-wearers. Daily disposable contacts offer a very safe option for lens wearers and their growing popularity is testament to the comfort they provide. Nevertheless, researchers need to continue work on maximising this comfort so that they ultimately achieve the ideal level, which would be replicating the non-wearer experience, Lazon de la Jara added.