New Research Covers Alternative Method of Treating Dry Eye

Mile Brujic, OD, FAAO, a partner at Premier Vision Group, discussed new research on dry eye being presented at the Southeastern Educational Congress of Optometry (SECO) 2025 meeting held from February 27 to March 2, 2025, in Atlanta, Georgia. He also discussed how light therapy can be used in various eye conditions effectively.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

Can you explain what research you are presenting at SECO?

I'm here at SECO presenting a paper, and it's some interesting data. It was a case series on patients who were being treated for dry eye with a variety of different strategies. And 1 of the things that I had them on, in addition to usually pharmaceuticals and other advanced procedures, was I had them on intracanalicular, dissolvable plugs that usually last about 6 months.

Well, there's now a new, novel gel that's made of sodium hyaluronate that we can actually fill the lacrimal system with, and in doing so, you get a more full fill. I was curious to see, is there going to be any clinical difference in these patients who have traditionally had the rod-type intracanalicular plugs versus the gel? What we found was surprising. On these 3 patients that I'm reporting on, their corneal staining improved dramatically. Their speed scores improved, and interestingly, a lot of their InflammaDry scores improved as well.

Key takeaways from the poster would be [that] intracanalicular, dissolvable sodium hyaluronate gel is certainly becoming impactful and more important in our clinical practices, and I think as a standalone or also to supplement our dry efforts, I think it's just going to improve patients' lifestyles.

How can light therapy help patients manage their eye conditions?

When we talk about light therapy and eye care, it's evolved tremendously. We used to think it's making sure we protect our eyes from UV exposure. Certainly, that's one ramification to light. But we've now leveraged and harnessed the power of light, not only to refract patients, but also to help them with other conditions. The 2 biggest things that we have in eye care right now are low-level light therapy and intense pulse light therapy. And both of these leverage different wavelengths for patient care. What we find is it helps patients with ocular rosacea or standard dry eye, secondary to meibomian gland dysfunction, and gives them the ability to restore some normalcy.

The way we treat them right now is, for low light level therapy, it's a session of 6 sessions where they sit behind a high-powered low light level therapy for 15 minutes at a time, separated by 1 week. For [intense pulse light], it's 4 sessions separated by 2 weeks apart with intense pulsed light on the surface of the eye. The good news is, it works.

The bad news is, from a patient's perspective, they are required to pay those costs. It's a different conversation when somebody doesn't have coverage for this and the patient actually has to either do 1 of 2 things: look at their own funds to determine how they're actually going to pay for it, or decide against treatment, which is always an unfortunate predicament when we have that in our offices, when we know it'll help patients.