Combined atropine with orthokeratology in childhood myopia control (AOK) – A randomized controlled trial
Dr Paul Gifford consults with the contact lens industry on development of contact lens designs and their implementation into clinical practice. He is a partner in private practice conducting clinical research on use of contact lenses and orthokeratology to control progression of myopia, and holds an Adjunct Senior Lecturer position at the School of Optometry and Vision Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney. Both orthokeratology (OK)1,2 and atropine3 have been shown to slow the progression of myopia. This naturally leads to the question of what may happen if both treatments were to be combined. Pauline Cho’s Hong Kong Polytechnic based research group have set about answering this very question and presented their initial 6-month results at the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (ARVO) conference in Vancouver, Canada, 2019. Prior to this work, the peer-reviewed literature contained just two papers on the subject. Wan et al. published a retrospective analysis across two-years which compared children who had worn only OK against those that had combined atropine with OK wear.4 However this early work has been criticised for a number of aspects relating to study design and data analysis. Kinoshita et al. measured axial eye length after 3 months of OK lens wear to act as a baseline measure and then randomly assigned half of the cohort to use 0.01% topical atropine once nightly in addition to continuing OK lens wear, with the remaining participants continuing with OK wear only.5 After one year they reported 52% less axial eye elongation across the combined therapy … [ Read More ]
