Dry Eye Symptoms Affect Patients of All Ages

Jessilin Quint, OD, MBA, FAAO, from Smart Eye Care, and Rebecca Petris, cofounder of the Dry Eye Foundation, discuss the symptoms surrounding dry eye and the ways that dry eye can be addressed with a patient's doctor.

This transcript has been lightly edited.

Transcript

What are the biggest symptoms of dry eye and how can patients address it?

Quint: Dry eye is a very common condition that affects the front surface of the eye. Symptoms can really vary. Sometimes patients can experience burning, watering eyes, itching, tired eyes, and fluctuating vision, and the severity can range. Sometimes patients can have these symptoms just very intermittently, not too frequently. And sometimes that those symptoms can actually turn into a chronic dry eye disease state that can become more severe and obviously impact a patient a little bit more in depth.

Petris: It's almost like we've got this great big bucket of symptoms, right. And each of us patients might have 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 of those, but we might be really different from each other. We've experienced them in all degrees. I think dry eye medically is kind of like a catch-all term for a lot of different ocular surface conditions and diseases, right. But what those all have in common is drawing from this bucket of symptoms on the patient side.

Quint: Absolutely. And I think with dry eye, there's definitely this misconception out there that it only affects kind of older individuals or certain patient demographics. But the reality is that patients of all ages, of all walks of life, males, females, everybody can really be impacted by this. And the symptoms do often vary. And there's so many different multifactorial components to dry eye. Sometimes there's lifestyle factors, genetics, certain medications that can really put a patient at risk for having some of these.

But I think the take-home message is that we're seeing a huge increase in the prevalence of dry eye. And so we know that this is a condition that could really impact a patient's daily activities, it can really impact their daily life. And so it's something we need to be talking about, we need to be raising awareness about it, because there are so many different treatment options out there. With so much dry eye innovation, they don't have to suffer.

Petris: I think dry eye of today is like this 21st century public health problem, right, it's still to a large degree flying way under the radar. We need people to be more aware. If they don't have symptoms that are seriously interfering with their life, we still need them to be aware of what those symptoms might mean so they get evaluated. And we need all our health care providers really as part of that education process, because I think a lot of some of the complicating contributors to it are medical treatments. We've got tons of medications and procedures and things that can contribute to dry eye and we need our whole health care team aware that that can be part of it.

Quint: Absolutely, it takes a team approach for sure. Because sometimes our patients, you know, I'm an eye care provider and so I want every patient that has an eye issue to come [and] go see an eye doctor, but sometimes patients aren't necessarily going to an eye care provider for their eye problems. And so that's why it really does take a whole team of anybody in health care to just have an awareness of what some of these symptoms are. And if [patients] do have them, to address those or to direct those patients back to an optometrist or ophthalmologist to really treat that dry eye.