Many contact lens wearers experience some discomfort when putting them on. Almost half of the 140 million people who use them around the world feel dry, itchy or burning, which ends up causing many of them to stop.
The cause of this phenomenon is not clear. However, a new study promoted by researchers from the Applied Ophthalmobiology Institute of the University of Valladolid, the Center for Networked Biomedical Research in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Nanomedicine and the University of Minho, in Portugal, points out that certain factors are decisively involved in all of this. environmental conditions .
Thus, air conditioning or heating in buildings and cars, factors that usually reduce the humidity of the environment and, at the same time, produce air flows, end up affecting the integrity of the surface of the eye. In an essay published in the journal Ophthalmic and Physiological Optics , these scientists explain how it responds in a normal interior space, such as an office, and an airplane cabin, where the aforementioned conditions are extreme, with low relative humidity, low atmospheric pressure and a continuous air flow.
To determine this, they analyzed the reactions of 54 volunteers – half of them said they suffered discomfort with their contact lenses – in a facility that simulated those environments. In the tests, all of them used two types of lenses, hydrogel and silicone hydrogel. The researchers found that the most adverse environmental conditions had a greater impact on the integrity of the ocular surface and that the type of lens was also a factor to take into account . Despite this, they did not find significant differences between the two groups of users.
As María Jesús González-García, one of the researchers who has participated in this initiative, explained to the Scientific Information and News Service, “it is an absence of a relationship between symptoms and clinical signs, something that is repeated over and over again in the literature scientific ”. For this expert, ” because of the discomfort while wearing contact lenses remains unknown , so there is still much to discover to try to better understand this condition.”
Image: CDC / Amanda Mills
