Contact lens case hygiene, replacement low despite high-risk awareness among users
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Compliance with contact lens storage case hygiene and replacement was poor, despite general awareness of risks, according to a study published in Optometry and Vision Science.
“Many contact lens wearers take good care of their contact lenses but are more negligent about the need of cleaning and replacing their contact lens storage cases,” Genis Cardona, PhD, of the department of optics and optometry at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Spain, told Healio. “Contaminated storage cases may increase the risk of contact lens contamination and, therefore, of ocular infection and visual loss.”
Cardona and colleagues administered a self-reported, ad-hoc survey between March 15 and April 30, 2021, to evaluate contact lens (CL) wearer demographics, user knowledge and compliance with storage case and lens care, type of information received and risk perception. They divided the digital survey into five sections, with an additional question asking participants to rate their overall compliance with storage case care and replacement from one (bad) to five (excellent).
Researchers received 299 completed surveys from non-daily disposable CL-wearing participants (median age 24 years; 76.9% women), 68.6% of whom exposed their storage cases to tap water, 26.4% failed to replace them after 6 months, and 19.1% reported never cleaning their cases.
Study results revealed a high rate of perceived risk associated with poor-compliance practices, with two-thirds of respondents reporting receiving specific information on case maintenance. Researchers also found that risk perception increased with educational level (P = .02, regarding handwashing; P = .03, regarding case hygiene), years of CL wear experience (P < .001, regarding handwashing) and in those patients provided with specific information on CL case care (P = .01, regarding case replacement).
More than 40% of respondents kept their cases on or near sinks in the bathroom, and 26.4% kept their cases inside bathroom cabinets, despite the potential for organisms such as Acanthamoeba to thrive in these locations, “suggesting that these water sources may serve as a microbial source for an eventual infection,” the authors wrote.
Overall, the results highlight a disconnect between risk awareness and compliance and support a wider effort to communicate the importance of proper hygiene practices to users.
“Although many contact lens wearers do not take proper care of their contact lenses and storage cases, they are commonly aware of the need to do so and of the possible associated risks,” Cardona told Healio. “It is unclear why this awareness fails to translate into better practices, but we believe that by education and good and constant communication between visual health practitioners and patients, risk awareness may be further increased, finally breaching a threshold leading to actual better compliance.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts