Vital tears

By Lea Weeby
ST Mind Your Body on Thursday,
June 30, 2011 at 9:40pm

A study here has found that dry eyes may have a greater impact on people's quality of life than previously thought.

The study on 3,280 Malays aged 40 to 79 found that people with dry eyes had more difficulty with daily tasks such as recognising friends, reading road signs and driving at night than those who did not.

Said to be one of the first large-scale studies worldwide to look at the impact of dry eyes on a person's quality of life, the study was published in Eye, the journal of the Royal College of Ophthalmologists, last year.

Prior to the study, the popular belief was that dry eyes were just a minor discomfort to put up with.

'But our study shows that it has an impact on one's quality of life and even work. A taxi driver with poor night vision would not be able to work at night,' said one of the authors, Dr Louis Tong, consultant ophthalmologist from the Singapore National Eye Centre.

One in 10 participants reported they had symptoms associated with dry eyes at least once a week or all of the time.

The symptoms were: a feeling of dryness, grittiness, a burning sensation, redness, crusting along the eyelash and the tendency to shut their eyes because of tiredness or heaviness.

When the participants were asked to rate the level of difficulty in doing 11 vision-related activities, those with dry eyes had significantly more difficulty with at least seven of the activities compared to those without dry eyes.

These were cooking, climbing stairs, watching television, reading the newspaper and road signs, driving at night and recognising friends.

The results were the same even after the researchers used statistical tools to rule out factors like age, gender and eye diseases such as cataracts, which could have explained the participants' difficulty in doing these daily activities.

The dry eye study was done as part of the Singapore Malay Eye Study, with similar studies on Singapore Chinese and Indians still being analysed.

Dr Tong, who is also a clinical scientist at Singapore Eye Research Institute, said he would not be surprised if the findings were all similar.

He said: 'In our clinic, we encounter dry eye patients from different ethnic backgrounds.'

In people with dry eyes, the tear glands do not make enough tears or, as is more common in Singaporeans, they make enough tears but these evaporate at an abnormally fast rate so that dry spots appear in the eyes.

The prevalence of dry eyes is even higher when other methods of assessment were used, said DrTong.

In another study where 1,000 polyclinic patients aged 21 and above were tested using a diagnostic tool for dry eyes called the Schirmer's test, one in every two were found to have dry eyes. In the test, strips of filter paper were stuck in the eyes to measure the production of tears.

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