Children with congenital myopia never had any means of slowing the progression; quacks abounded with promises that were never fulfilled. There is a ray of hope with special lenses.                                      Team@CMHF

Results of an early phase trial indicate that wearing an experimental dual-focus soft contact lens can reduce myopia progression in children, according to a New Zealand team.
Evidence from animal and human studies indicate that retinal defocus — with the plane of focus in front to the retina — reduces axial eye growth, but at the cost of poor acuity.

The researchers developed a dual-focus soft contact lens with a central zone that corrects refractive error and presents a clear retinal image, while concentric treatment zones on the lens simultaneously create sustained retinal defocus peripherally.

To see if wearing the lens would slow myopia progression, 40 affected children wear the dual-focus lens in one eye and a single vision distance lens in the other for 10 months, and then switch lens assignment between eyes for a second 10-month period. The children were between 11 and 14 years of age, with a mean spherical equivalent refraction (SER) of -2.71 diopters.

During the first period, the mean change in SER was -0.44 diopters in the eyes with dual-focus lens compared with -0.69 diopters with the single-focus lens. Corresponding mean increases in axial length were 0.11 mm and 0.22 mm, according to the report.

“In 70% of the children, myopia progression was reduced by 30% or more in the eye wearing the dual-focus lens relative to that wearing the single vision distance lens,” the investigators found. Similar results were seen in the second period when the lenses were swapped.

Ref: http://www.thedoctorschannel.com/video/4059.html