VIDEO: ‘Multifactorial’ nature of dry eye makes diagnosis challenging

Editor’s note: This is a previously posted video, and the below is an automatically generated transcript to be used for informational purposes. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Dry eye is very much a multifactorial disease, and that's what makes it difficult to diagnose. So not everybody has the same contributing factors. Not everybody has the same set of symptoms. And the symptoms that patients do exhibit sometimes aren't classically thought of as dry eye symptoms. So, you know, we have, you know, patients coming to us with complaints that we might not associate with the disease, so it does require us to be sort of having it on our radar and looking for it. Clinically, there can also be a disconnect between how patients feel and how they look, so early in the course of dry eye disease, patients might not actually have breakdown on their cornea, you know, so we classically say, "Oh, you know, if there's staining on the cornea, they have dry eye," but that's actually a late finding. Once the cornea has kind of degraded enough to have punctate epithelial erosions, it's actually a moderate plus level patient. And so I think, you know, if I could ask for anything, it would be to have additional diagnostics available to us that can help to not only diagnose, to make the initial diagnosis, but also help us to stratify our dry eye patients so that we can kind of start to group them into different patterns and understand who might be better at, you know, certain treatments versus other.