BCLA@Yours - podcast series podcast

BCLA CLEAR Episode 8 - Contact lens wettability, cleaning, disinfection and interactions with tears

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In the eighth instalment in the BCLA CLEAR podcast series Dr Melissa Barnett – a Fellow of the BCLA and Global Ambassador for the BCLA – interviews Dr Fabrizio Zeri about the BCLA CLEAR paper on contact lens materials. Dr Zeri is a Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca and Visiting Research Fellow at Aston University in Birmingham. Contact lens materials have undergone significant changes over the past 20 years, particularly with respect to the introduction of silicone hydrogel materials. Whilst this development addressed hypoxic issues, other important areas relating to contact lens success, notably comfort, require further research. Contact lens wettability remains a crucially important part of biocompatibility. Dr Barnet and Dr Zeri cover some of this and more in this episode. Don’t forget that you can access the full report – which contains more in depth coverage of this research – from the BCLA website.

Contact lenses can be made more wettable by incorporation of surfactants into blister packs, internal wetting agents, surface treatments or care solutions. However, there remains no clear association between contact lens wettability and comfort, making it challenging to determine the potential for these approaches to be of significant clinical benefit. Most contact lenses are used on a daily wear, reusable basis, which requires them to be disinfected when not worn. The ideal disinfecting solution would also improve comfort during wear. However, balancing these requirements with other factors, including biocompatibility, remains a challenge. Soft lens materials invariably take up and subsequently release certain components of disinfecting solutions onto the ocular surface. This may affect tear film stability and the normal ocular microbiome, and further research is needed in this area to determine whether this has any affect on comfort. Finally, contact lens materials sorb components of the tear film, and these interactions are complex and may change the biochemistry of the tear film, which in turn may affect their comfort.

BCLA CLEAR is an initiative that has drawn together thousands of research papers on many different aspects of contact lenses into one place. The findings were published in, Contact Lens and Anterior Eye, the BCLA's scientific journal, in April 2021 under ten reports. BCLA CLEAR was facilitated by the BCLA, with financial support by way of Educational Grants for collaboration, publication and dissemination provided by Alcon and CooperVision.

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