Customized therapy needed to effectively treat severe dry eye

BEIJING — With many options available for treating severe dry eye, individualizing and combining treatment options to each patient's specific needs can help maximize results, according to a speaker here.

"The specific patient determines the specific treatment," Zuguo Liu, MD, PhD, said at the 25th APAO Congress. "Also, the combination of different therapies for one patient [is effective] — usually, it's very difficult to have one therapy for one patient to control severe dry eye. The goal of the treatment should be the least damage and the best result."

Severe dry eye challenges include a chronically inflamed ocular surface, limbus deficiency or corneal epithelial defect or ulcer, Dr. Liu said. He outlined eight different treatment options available for severe dry eye. The first option that he discussed, moisture chambers, are not commercially available for use in China and must be made by physicians themselves, he said.

The second option, artificial tears, is recommended as non-preserved formulations to avoid ocular damage, Dr. Liu said. The third option, punctal plugs, can be administered in different methods, including as a plug or Argon laser punctoplasty. The fourth option, steroid or immunosuppressive agents, can help in inhibiting ocular surface inflammation, he said.

The other options Dr. Liu discussed were autologous serum, amniotic membrane eye drops, ocular surface reconstruction and salivary gland transplantation.