Several Treatments Exist for Use in Dry Eye: Karen Fernandez, MD

Karen Fernandez, MD, an ophthalmologist at the Storm Eye Institute at the Medical University of South Carolina, discussed how doctors can treat patients with dry eye with a variety of different options, which allows doctors to tailor treatment to patients.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What treatments are there for those diagnosed with dry eye?

That's a great question, because not a lot of people know that there [are] plenty of treatments for dry eye and often it's a combination of these treatments that we give patients depending on the severity of their condition. The most common are lubricating eye drops, or artificial tears. They're called artificial tears because they act like your tears. They're not really equivalent to your natural tears, but they can lubricate the eye enough that it'll help with your symptoms. These are over the counter. You can get them from any drugstore. They do help, but very, very temporarily; they're not really fixing the root cause of your dryness.

A lot of times, in patients with more severe symptoms, chronic symptoms, or long-term dry eye, we would recommend prescription eye drops, and these are drops like cyclosporine or lifitegrast. Those are the most common prescription eye drops we give. And these are meant to reduce inflammation in the eyes, which is known to always be secondary to dry eye. You always have some surface inflammation. These can also help restore tear function and increase your production of tears. In response, you're trying to stimulate natural tear production in your eyes.

There are other things that we recommend, including oral supplements or vitamins, which can include omega-3 supplementation, or there are some over-the-counter vitamins that can increase lubrication within the body. And these can also be helpful for dry eye. We always recommend: warm compresses; taking care of your eyelids; removing makeup at the end of the day; just keeping your eyelids clean, because your eyelids come in very close contact with your eyes. If there's any inflammation on your eyelids, it can cause secondary inflammation within your eyes as well.