ARVO LIVE: Soft contact lenses featuring myopia control optics in children and teenagers

Ophthalmology Times® talked with Alex Nixon, OD, about the subjective experience between teenagers and younger children with soft contact lenses featuring myopia control optics at this year's ARVO meeting.

Video transcript

Editor’s note: Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Alex Nixon, OD:

My name is Alex Nixon. I'm a principal research optometrist at Johnson and Johnson vision, and my presentation is about the subjective experience with soft contact lenses featuring myopia control optics, and how that compares between teenagers and younger children.

Soft contact lenses with myopia control optics have shown the ability to slow myopia progression over time, however, they can cause a design-dependent reduction in vision quality. In children from 7 to 12 years, the lenses seem to be extremely well-tolerated. However, less is known about the experience wearing these contact lenses in the teenage population. To answer this question, we ran a multi-site clinical study recruiting children from 7 to 17 years of age. In the clinical study, all children first experienced a run-in period where they all wore a conventional optics soft contact lens design. After they completed this period, the children were randomized and experienced one of three different myopia control optical contact lenses, over a two week period, and they experienced those in a random order.

We assess their subjective vision using a patient reported outcomes questionnaire called the Pediatric Myopia Control Contact Lens Questionnaire, and generally we considered a top 2 box out of a 5 box scale to be a good response. We used a Pearson chi-square to look at the difference in vision performance between the teenage population and the younger children. We did find a significant difference in that the performance was perceived to be lower for the teenage children in 2 of the lenses compared to the younger children. The 2 lenses that reached or approached statistical significance were lenses that featured stronger myopia control optics and would have been expected to have more of an impact on vision quality. In addition, there were 2 discontinuations due to quality of vision in 1 of the contact lens designs. Both of those came from the older teenage population.

In conclusion, the subjective experience wearing soft contact lenses with myopia control optics seems to be different in a younger population of children versus a teenage population. Given the teenage populations more critical assessment of visual quality and their slower rate of myopia progression, it may be necessary to have different designs, providing an alternate balance of myopia control efficacy and vision quality for that teenager population.