Myopia control contact lens – MiSight – Available January 2018
Health Canada has recently granted approval for the MiSight soft contact lens by CooperVision. The MiSight contact lens is a daily disposable contact lens with specially designed optics that has been shown to reduce the rate of change of a child’s myopia by up to 59%. Myopia or nearsightedness is a refractive error (prescription) where the person sees near objects clearly but those in the distance are blurry.
The rate of myopia is projected to rapidly increase over the coming decades. While genetics or family history play a role, environmental factors seems to be driving this change. Children are spending more hours indoors and viewing objects close up, more intently than previous generations. Currently about 30% of children aged 13 in Canada are myopic.
Abbey Eye Care is excited to be one of the very first clinics in Canada to have access to this contact lens.
The lens works by focusing a clear image of distance objects straight ahead onto the retina (back of the eye). While at the same time, peripheral objects are focused in front of the retina, creating some “blurriness” of a persons side vision. Thankfully our side vision is very tolerant of blur and children show a high level of acceptance of that and experience little to no visual side-effects.
This peripheral blur (orange curve in the above diagram) is what signals the eye to not grow as much and hence control the prescription change.
This new soft contact lens worn during the day, provides us with another tool to slow down the rate of change of a child’s prescription along with Ortho-K, which is a hard contact lens worn at night time.
For more information on this lens please visit the CooperVision website.
