Santa Fe New Mexican

Alternativ­e to reading glasses — eye drops

- By Melinda Wenner Moyer

An eye drop that improves closerange vision could make misplaced reading glasses less of an inconvenie­nce for many of the 128 million Americans who suffer from age-related deficits in near vision.

Vuity, which became available by prescripti­on this month, is a once-a-day treatment that can help users see up close without affecting their long-range vision.

“For anybody who doesn’t want to fiddle with reading glasses, this might be a really helpful alternativ­e,” said Dr. Scott MacRae, an ophthalmol­ogist at the University of Rochester’s Center for Visual Science. MacRae was not involved in the clinical trials for the drug, which was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administra­tion in late October.

Nearly 90 percent of U.S. adults older than 45 have problems with close-range vision, a condition known as presbyopia that typically worsens over time.

To focus on close objects, the eye’s lens must change shape, yet it becomes less flexible as people age, making this process difficult. “Your ability to zoom in decreases,” MacRae said.

People who suffer from presbyopia often find they need to hold a book at arm’s length or turn on a bright light to read it, said Dr. George Waring IV, an ophthalmol­ogist and medical director of the Waring Vision Institute in Mount Pleasant, S.C., who led Vuity’s clinical trials for the pharmaceut­ical company Allergan. Typically, eye doctors recommend people with presbyopia wear over-the-counter or prescripti­on reading glasses when they need to see up close, but Vuity may also be an option for them, he said.

Vuity improves near vision by constricti­ng the size of the pupil. “It makes the pupil small, creating what we call a pinhole effect,” which reduces the amount of peripheral light that passes through the eye that can make it hard to focus, said Dr. Stephen Orlin, an ophthalmol­ogist at the University of Pennsylvan­ia Perelman School of Medicine.

Vuity’s active ingredient is a drug called pilocarpin­e, and it is not a new medication. It’s actually “one of the oldest drops that we have in ophthalmol­ogy,” Orlin said. It has been used for decades to treat glaucoma, a condition characteri­zed by damage to the optic nerve.

Although Vuity is the first product of its kind to treat presbyopia, at least nine similar eye-drop products are in clinical developmen­t to treat presbyopia and may be available in the future, Waring said.

Waring and his colleagues presented the results of their Phase 3 clinical trials, which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery in July.

A single Vuity drop in each eye improved trial subjects’ close-range vision for six hours and improved their intermedia­te vision — important for computer work — for 10 hours.

Vuity’s benefit over reading glasses is that it does not impair distance vision as reading glasses do. Usually, when a person stops reading to do something else, they need to remove their reading glasses to see around them properly.

“That’s the good part about this — the drops don’t really affect distance vision under normal daylight conditions,” MacRae said.

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