"Dry eye" is a common eye problem. Patients usually experience dry eye symptoms for many years. They visit many eye doctors but often remain unsatisfied with therapy results. Then they come to another ophthalmologist and expect better results. What causes "dry eye"? What are the complications of "dry eye"? What is the best treatment for "dry eye"? Are there any innovations in the field of dry eye therapy? Dry eye syndrome is a very interesting disease because it's a common disease. What characterizes dry eye diseases is that some patients are impaired with a very mild form of dry eye. Some other patients are not very much impaired with a very severe form of dry eye. But the problem is because dry eye is affecting the ocular surface. It is affecting the cornea. And so the complications for a very severe form of the dry eye develop, like Sjogren syndrome. And third, we need a really good treatment for dry eye. In children, dry eye syndrome also exists. And of course, there are unusual presentations. You have dry eye syndrome also in graft-versus-host disease. Dry eye exists in, for instance, in leukemia, in organ transplants. Dry eye happens in all the situations that are so unusual. But dry eye also needs really effective treatment. So we try to have innovation in dry eye therapy every day. Pharmaceutical companies work on that. There are very common artificial tears. Today artificial tears are a very complex association of agents, and it's a very interesting association. We have hyaluronic acid. All of these components of artificial tears are very, very, very good. So we have artificial tears for the basic treatment of the dry eye. We have many options today to use artificial tears for patients with dry eyes. Also, we try to have a treatment for dry eyes to repair the surface of the eye. But we also go to the new concepts of dry eye therapy. There is a medical meeting and also a book to explain that dry disease is not only dryness. It's also inflammation. And so that's very important to understand that dry eye is not dryness only. It's also inflammation of the ocular surface. And so, we need to find some eye drops to fight this inflammation. This is very important. That's why cyclosporine eye drops are also used in a low concentration, which is a different formulation from vernal conjunctivitis therapy. There is also another therapy concept for dry eye. It is Diquafosol ophthalmic solution 3 % (Diquas). But we don't have it in Europe. There are many areas of development for dry eye therapy. It is not so easy. But there are for sure there are some new therapy possibilities. It's always difficult to do dry eye clinical studies because the expression of dry eye disease is not so easy to understand. Dry eye is very complex because it is different from one patient to another. So that's why we have many clinical studies of new eye drops, but it's difficult to demonstrate [therapy success]. That was the problem. Cyclosporine eyedrops studies for dry eye, I hope, will demonstrate that it is really useful because we have patients with dry eye syndrome. We know that patients with dry eye are relieved of their syndromes with eyedrops with cyclosporine. So I hope it will be a more effective therapy method. So this is important to take away that patients with dry eye symptoms going on for many years should be aware that it's not just the dryness. There is some underlying inflammation that has to be treated at the causative level. And therefore, for example, talking to the ophthalmologist about potentially using a cyclosporin treatment is useful. Of course, it depends on the patient's situation, but that could also help and using the latest available artificial tears. Exactly. That's exactly a very good abstract of dry eye syndrome and inflammation. Thank you!
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