Edmond doctor helped develop new eye drops that could mean freedom from reading glasses
An Edmond optometrist aided in the development of a new eye treatment that could offer freedom from reading glasses.
The treatment, a prescription eye drop called Vuity, can treat presbyopia, a common eye condition that causes blurry near vision. The Food and Drug Administration just approved the drops earlier this month.
Dr. Selina McGee owns BeSpoke Vision in Edmond and serves on Oklahoma's State Board of Examiners in Optometry. In her work as a consultant with the pharmaceutical company Allergan, she educates other eye care providers on how the new eye drops can help their patients.
Presbyopia is common especially in people over 40. Many people who have it manage it with bifocals, reading glasses, or contact lenses, McGee said.
“Those are all ways that we have managed presbyopia in the past,” she said. “This is the first eye drop to treat presbyopia.”
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People with presbyopia might have trouble seeing in dim spaces.
“The best example I see is when people are in a really lovely restaurant with great ambience, but it's really dim, and you see like the sea of cell phones with the lights on trying to read the menu,” McGee said. “That’s presbyopia.”
The drops work by reducing the size of a person’s pupil to increase their depth of focus, McGee said.
“When you reduce the pupil size by about half, you reduce the blurry vision by about half,” she said.
The drops don’t affect a person’s distance vision.
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The drops take about 15 minutes to kick in, last about six hours, and can be used in conjunction with lenses a person already wears. The drops weren't studied in contact-lens wearers, but McGee, a contact-lens wearer herself, uses the drops with her contacts.
She said patients often say they enjoy the "freedom" of not having to rely on over-the-counter reading glasses to see up close.
"I'm somebody that's worn contacts and glasses since I was 10. That's what brought me into this field," she said. "But not having to rely on something else to help me see small print has been really a lot of fun."
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Edmond optometrist plays a role in new eye drops that could replace reading glasses
