With a long, holiday weekend ahead of us, I am reminded of the many benefits of contact lens wear for our patients, particularly as people head out to parks and playgrounds to enjoy the Memorial Day holiday here in the United States. This is often something easy for us as practitioners to forget about. Aside from the excellent visual correction, the convenience and practicality that contact lenses afford patients is quite important. This can be particularly true for some modalities such as daily disposables and extended wear, but is certainly a true benefit of contact lens wear in general. So, let's not forget about these important things as we care for our patients.

The American Optometric Society (AOS) announced that it has signed contracts to begin the second in its series of radio messages promoting optometry and eye examinations through its Promote Optometry 2011 advertising campaign.

The AOS sponsored radio messages will begin airing on May 31, and, among other places, will be featured on the health oriented "Health Watch" programs on CBS stations in Los Angeles and New York and on the syndicated Delilah show on stations across the United States. The recorded messages feature a practicing doctor of optometry speaking directly to potential patients.

The AOS sponsored radio ads can be heard on the AOS website www.optometricsociety.org, Facebook page, and on YouTube, as well as on nearly two hundred USA radio stations and worldwide on AAFES Radio.

Bausch + Lomb (B+L) recently announced the hiring of Benjamin Chudner, OD, as the Training Manager for the North America Vision Care, Learning + Development Team. Dr. Chudner will bring the perspective of the practicing physician to training throughout the B+L's Vision Care Division.

Dr. Chudner comes to B+L with 14 years experience. Most recently, he was in private practice in the Seattle area. Previously in 2001, Dr. Chudner purchased The Eye and Contact Lens Clinic, where he served as President and was one of two optometric physicians. Dr. Chudner launched his career at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.

SynergEyes Inc. contact lenses has expanded the parameters of its new silicone hydrogel hybrid contact lens for astigmatism, Duette.

Duette is now available in sphere powers from +6.00D to -15.00D. The Duette parameters are offered in five base curves and three skirt curves. Eye care professionals interested in prescribing Duette should visit www.fitsynergeyes.com.

Optometry Cares, the AOA Foundation's Endowment Fund Advisory Committee, announces its 2011 Scholarship Grant recipients. Optometry Cares sponsors an annual essay contest for two separate, distinct national scholarship programs.

Dawn Tank from University of Missouri - St. Louis College of Optometry was selected for the $2,500 Dr. Seymour Galina Grant. This scholarship fund was established through a bequest from the late Seymour Galina, OD.

Andrea Sis from Northeastern State University - Oklahoma College of Optometry was chosen as the national winner for the InfantSEE Scholarship Grant. Ms. Sis will be awarded $5,000 and the runner up, Stephanie McLin from Southern College of Optometry, will receive $2,500. The InfantSEE Scholarship Grant was created by Vision West, Inc., a leading national ophthalmic product buying group to promote InfantSEE, a no-cost public health program of Optometry Cares, developed to provide professional eye care for infants nationwide.

Representatives from Bausch + Lomb (B+L) and Lions Clubs International Foundation (LCIF) awarded the Tianjin Eye Hospital in China a $150,000 grant to finance a specialized, pediatric cataract training initiative. The grant is made possible through the Pediatric Cataract Initiative (PCI), which identifies, funds and promotes innovative methods for overcoming visual impairments caused by pediatric cataracts.

The grant will be used for training and education, equipment and screenings for pediatric cataract.

Vistakon, Division of Johnson & Johnson Vision Care, Inc., announced the "Acuvue 1•Day Contest," which will bring five winners to Los Angeles to meet and be mentored by one of five top teen icons, including Joe Jonas, Meaghan Martin, Charice, Allyson Felix and Sterling Knight.

The five lucky winners will also receive a second trip to Los Angeles to attend a teen awards event, and a one-year supply of 1•Day Acuvue Moist Brand Contact Lenses (awarded in the form of a $460.00 Visa Gift Card).

To enter, through June 30, 2011, contestants can go to the Acuvue brand channel on YouTube, www.youtube.com/acuvue, and upload a 30 to 60 second video showcasing what they hope to achieve one day, how they find the confidence to pursue their dreams and why they should be chosen. Official Rules can be found on the Acuvue brand page on YouTube.

Additional findings from the Needs, Symptoms, Incidence, Global Eye Health Trends (NSIGHT) study were recently released. The study, commissioned by Bausch + Lomb, was conducted by an independent market research firm, Market Probe: Europe. The firm surveyed 3,800 spectacle- and contact lens-corrected subjects, 15 to 65 years of age, from seven different countries (China, Korea, Japan, France, Italy, United Kingdom, United States) to better understand the eye-related symptoms that vision-corrected patients experience.

Recent study highlights include:

• About half of the spectacle and contact lens wearers surveyed reported suffering from the symptoms of halos (52% and 56%, respectively) and glare (47% and 50%, respectively) more than three times a week.
• More than four of five patients who experienced these symptoms found each symptom bothersome (84% and 89% for halo and glare, respectively).
• About 90% of these patients (90% for halos, 91% for glares) reported having either no solution or one that was unsatisfactory.

Additional analyses and reports from the exhaustive data obtained in NSIGHT are expected to appear in optometry journals and professional congresses throughout 2011.

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A 25 year-old female soft contact lens wearer presented for a routine examination. She had no complaints and her visual acuity was 20/20. We discovered a tumor in the anterior chamber of her right eye. Gonioscopy showed an elevated mass. The patient was referred to the University Hospital of Maastricht, the Netherlands. Doctors there referred her to the University Hospital of Leiden were the tumor was removed. A histopathological examination revealed that the tumor was malignant and the patient was treated with radiation.

Dave Block
Optician and Contact Lens Specialist
Paul Block Optiek
Eijsden, the Netherlands

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Our Neighbors Up North
I had the privilege of being invited to present at Journeés Optométriques, in Québec City, Québec, Canada, over the weekend. In preparing for my lecture, I discovered that although our two nations share a sizable border, we have differences with regards to contact lens care products.

First, Health Canada's (Canada's regulatory body, like the United States Food and Drug Administration) classification of lens care products as drugs rather than medical devices adds rigor and length to the regulatory process. This distinction also may lead to differences in product marketing and labeling—which must be done in both English and French.

As a result, the new solutions launched in the U.S. last year, Biotrue (Bausch + Lomb) and RevitaLens OcuTec (Abbott Medical Optics) are not yet available in Canada. In addition, the contact lens-related Fusarium keratitis outbreak in the U.S. and Asia of a few years ago had little affect in Canada, due to the fact that ReNu with MoistureLoc (Bausch + Lomb) had not yet been approved there. In my next column, I will present more differences in lens care prescribing and management between the U.S. and our neighbors to the north.

A Question About Staining
Recently I have had the opportunity to review data from several clinical studies, including several from our own research team. Certainly there are several "accepted" outcome variables in clinical trials of dry eye disease, and one that always rises to the top of the list is ocular surface staining. In most instances, clinicians associate "staining" with fluorescein corneal staining. Leaving that topic aside for a moment, let's focus on Lissamine green staining of the conjunctiva. At a recent continuing education lecture, I had the audacity to state that it was unclear to me why we continue to perform Lissamine green staining. In any clinical trial in which I have seen the data, there is no statistically significant difference in conjunctival staining with therapy or from baseline. So why have I, as well as other ocular surface "experts" recommended Lissamine green staining? When I ask this to an audience there will invariably be several practitioners that feel it is important clinically in contact lens related dry eye. This takes me back to staining in general--is corneal fluorescein staining or Lissamine green conjunctival staining really what we think it is?

Severe ocular surface diseases (OSDs) are some of the most challenging entities facing the clinician today. This article aims to describe the recent advances and current development of ocular surface reconstruction from both basic science and clinical aspects.

To date, many candidate corneal epithelial stem or progenitor cell markers for culture grafts have been reported worldwide. Several groups have reported the long-term results of cultivated corneal and oral mucosal epithelial transplantation in severe OSD. In their attempt to further develop the system of ocular surface reconstruction, several groups recently reported using cells obtained from a novel origin, cell substrates, and safer culture procedures.

The authors report that autologous cultivated corneal limbal epithelial transplantation has been shown to be a well tolerated and promising treatment for patients with severe OSD. A newly developed transplantation technique using tissue-engineered epidermal adult stem cells, immature dental pulp stem cells, and hair follicle bulge-derived stem cells was reportedly successful for the reconstruction of corneal epithelium in an animal model of severe OSD. The recombinant human cross-linked collagen scaffold and a Food and Drug Administration-approved contact lens are also promising new techniques for successfully achieving ocular surface reconstruction.

Nakamura T, Kinoshita S. New hopes and strategies for the treatment of severe ocular surface disease. Curr Opin Ophthalmol. 2011 May 2. [Epub ahead of print]

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