Comanagement News

NEPTUNE, N.J. – Alan Tsai, OD, a resident at Atlantic Eye Physicians speaking here at the New Jersey Academy of Optometry fall dinner meeting, shares a case of a patient with keratoconus and spontaneous corneal perforation associated with hydrops. Tsai said the patient was aggressively treated with an anterior chamber injection of sulfur hexafluoride and a Prokera (Bio-Tissue) membrane, which resulted in fast healing.

NEW ORLEANS ― Optometrists should take control of patients by making the right referral, discussing lens options and making sure the patient is mentally and refractively prepared for surgery, Primary Care Optometry News Editorial Board Member Sondra Black, OD, FAAO, said here at the American Academy of Ophthalmology meeting.

Pursuant Health is launching a self-service retinal screening kiosk in an effort to prevent avoidable vision loss with early detection.

The Lions Eye Institute for Transplant and Research announced the launch of One World Sight Alliance, a global network that aims to eradicate preventable blindness through international tissue distribution and training.

The FDA has granted the Orion Cortical Visual Prosthesis System an Expedited Access Pathway, which is given to select medical devices indicated for the treatment of life-threatening or irreversibly debilitating diseases/conditions, according to a press release from Second Sight Medical Products.

It is no surprise that patients without a significant refractive error may wait until their 50s or even 60s before obtaining a comprehensive eye exam. Presbyopia in an emmetrope in some cases is a curse because it can be treated with store-bought reading glasses for decades.

In many respects, we live in a world of absolutes. For instance, in the late 1800s, Dr. Henry Pickering Bowditch proclaimed the “all-or-none law” to describe how nerves and muscles respond to stimuli in a very predictable way. Similarly, in 1928, mathematician Andrey Komogorov established “the zero-one law,” proving the probability occurrence of certain events, called “tail events,” is either zero or one.

Personalized medicine has become a trend in many facets of health care, from oncology to cardiology, and genetic testing for age-related macular degeneration signals its foray into eye care, according to Steven Ferrucci, OD, FAAO.

Diabetes has been called the disease that will bankrupt Medicare. As the single most expensive disease we treat, it cost more than $100 billion last year in the U.S. alone and more than $800 billion worldwide.

An overwhelming 79% of Americans are unaware that diabetic eye diseases exhibit no visible symptoms, and more than half are unaware that comprehensive eye exams can detect diabetes, according to the American Optometric Association.