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Congressional members, vision advocates, industry meet to champion ophthalmic care
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WASHINGTON — Legislators, vision advocates and members of the ophthalmic industry convened here this week to call for increased funding for ocular disease research and patient access to ophthalmic care.
Members of the House Vision Caucus, Prevent Blindness America and AdvaMed, a medical industry group, discussed how to raise awareness of diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy and cataract.
“We’re here to ensure that adequate resources are allocated towards eye diseases for better quality of life,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.
One of the goals of the meeting was “to educate Congress and staff,” said Rep. Gene Green, D-Texas.
“Nearly every day, we’re seeing things change,” he said.
Rep. Green said he will introduce legislation this week to increase funding for research at the National Eye Institute and the Centers for Disease Control into prevention of eye disease, to increase patient access to care and to improve access to vision rehabilitation centers.
The event, co-sponsored by Prevent Blindness America and AdvaMed, also featured a physician speaker, Kerry D. Solomon, MD, of the Storm Eye Institute in South Carolina.
“It’s really the technology and new surgical techniques that allow us to diagnose eye diseases much earlier than ever before and allow us to treat diseases in a way we never imagined before, let alone do on a day-to-day basis,” Dr. Solomon told attendees.
Dr. Solomon noted that the outcome of cataract surgery has changed from simply removing the cataract to providing vision better than the patient has ever experienced.
He noted that ophthalmologists routinely use ultrasound to measure the eye to eliminate the need for spectacles after cataract surgery and use wavefront technology – based on principles borrowed from astrophysics — to improve accuracy in refractive surgery.
“We now can take those same wavefront systems and evaluate the way light exits the eye to build a 3-D wavefront analysis,” he said. “Studies and research on this sort of technology will continue to improve the quality of people’s vision, perhaps better than ever before.”
The tried-and-true test of people’s vision – black letters on a white background – is also changing as researchers learn more about subjects such as contrast sensitivity, he said.
“What we’re coming to learn through vision research is that not all 20/20 rates, nor the ability to discern letters, is the same,” Dr. Solomon said.
A better understanding of contrast sensitivity may help improve the quality of life for cataract patients and also increase road safety as older patients remain more active, Dr. Solomon said.