AAOpt 2023: Success of getting contact lens dropouts back in daily disposables

Andrew D. Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO, FSLS, FBCLA, shared highlights from his poster, "Frequency of Successfully Bringing Contact Lens Dropouts Back into a Modern Daily Disposable Contact Lens at 6-Months," which he presented during the 2023 American Academy of Optometry in New Orleans.

Editor's note: This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Andrew D. Pucker, OD, PhD, FAAO, FSLS, FBCLA:

My name is Andrew Pucker, I'm the Senior Director of Clinical and Medical Sciences at Lexitas Pharma Services. I'm excited to be presenting my poster at Academy this year, which is on understanding how well patients can do with Dailies Total 1 for the first 6 months after being a contact lens drop out.

So, we enrolled subjects who were struggling with contact lenses, they really couldn't wear them anymore. What we wanted to do is see if we could bring them back into wearing lenses. We put everyone, all 60 subjects, into Dailies Total 1. We saw them in-person for a fitting, we [follow-up] in that one month in-person. Then, the focus of my poster has been the 6 month survey data.

What we found was that the vast majority of patients, over 80% of patients, were still wearing Dailies Total 1 at 6 months. [It's] amazing that they were people who are pretty much giving up on contact lenses, and now they're happy, healthy contact lens wearers again. With that, the same patients are happy to recommend these contact lenses to a friend, and they can wear them pretty much all day.

I think one of the big clinical takeaways we need to give to our patients is that if you are a contact lens wearer and struggling, there are options for you. So if you [are] not quite happy, make sure it's known to your doctor. The doctor should be actively asking these questions as well. If you find out that they're struggling, you should just offer them an alternative option, and [a] potentially good one is Dailies Total 1.

What's next for this research? Well, we only have data on Dailies Total 1. What we could potentially do is look at other modern contact lenses. This work was based on work from [Dr] Young [in] around 2002. In that study, they allowed patients to try any contact lens and they found that roughly 75% of patients could resume contact lenses. But, the data we have here is just on one lens and we could expand that to any modern lens and see if other lenses can perform as well.