Myopia control - U.K.

[mark-dad-2022]

My almost 9 year old daughter has myopia (shortsightednesses) and has a prescription of -4 and -5. One eye has dropped by -1 in 6 months.

We can't use Atropin in the U.K. yet, but our optician has recommended misight control lenses coupled with myopia control glasses lenses for when she isn't wearing the glasses.

Has anyone got experience of this - must admit I am a little worried at this stage.

We had a similar experience. My almost 8 year old son was assessed as -4.25 over a year and a half ago. He had gone up 1 diopter in 9 months (over lockdown). The optician suggested mi sight but he was unable to put then in himself at the trials. We practiced at home with my contact lenses & my husband was able to put these in my son's eyes. Our optician said they could not sell us the mi sight contact lenses if a parent was putting them in, it had to be the child. The optician didn't offer ortho k. I then had to contact other opticians to ask if they would agree to a parent putting in the lenses. I found 1 who would & my son has now been wearing the lenses for over a year. He can also now put them in himself. He finds them very comfortable & at the last few eye tests, there was no change in his prescription.

That's amazing news!

We had our "introduction to contact lenses" session on Friday last week and our daughter was able to put them in and take them out so half the battle won! We have our collection appointment in 2 days time and she's very excited.

Any guidance and tips on how your child got on with the lenses early on? Blurry at first? Only wear them for part of the day? Only wear them 6 days a week?

Thanks

That's great she was able to put the lenses in. My older son now also wears mi sight. Think they both found the lenses slightly blurry for the first few hours but that seemed to fade. They were both able to wear them all day from the start and every day but they can be a bit later going in at weekends! (My younger son is now 9 and a half but was almost 8 when he was first assessed at that prescription). Both boys much prefer wearing contact lenses to glasses & they are good for sport etc.

Just to further add, at the time we were getting mi sight lenses for my younger son, the myopia control glasses weren't available.

That's great to hear Jacqueline, thanks for the information and I'm so pleased they are doing the job.

Can't wait for her to get into them - if all else fails (she don't get on with the contacts) we will hit the glass lenses.

Hi,
Reigniting this thread as we are in similar situation to OP and has got us very worried. We want was it most effective, as who wouldn't, and we think ortho-k may be that, but we have also been offered misight like both of you. As parents who both wear soft lenses we do think the management would be easier, but it is of course an entirely different world for children.

So my question to you both and anyone else is what are the pitfalls you have experienced with misight and how did you overcome them? Were they short lived/easy to rectify? What was the worst experience you had? Infection is always a concern - has this happened ever? Do you know if there has been an improvement?

I look forward to hearing from you. Many thanks

Hi Gambitt,

We are now 7 months in using misight lenses.

Our daughter has had regular checks with the optician (every couple months) and her eyesight has remained static - no worsening! The only thing we don't know is of course would this have been the same even if we didn't use the lenses - we will never know but we wanted to take some sort of action considering her eyesight changes.

The hardest thing for us was patience - it took a few weeks for our daughter, who isn't the most patient (like me!) to get efficient at putting them in. We still have times where she struggles with one lens "not going right" but these are very few and far between. We also carry her glasses round with a spare pair of lenses everywhere we go - I'll get more comfortable not doing this very soon given how things now are.

We have had (touch wood), no infections and no real issues and are very impressed at this time with misight.

Our daughter prefers to wear the lenses as they don't get in the way of her activities plus the lenses, despite being thinner, were starting to become quite thick. I think with her eyesight being like this it has also made us much more aware of getting outside for at least an hour a day and (despite no evidence of it being a problem) less screen time.

With regards to the ones you leave in over night, our optician was a little against these for our relatively young daughter. I believe they "squash" (for the want of a better word) the eye and they it returns to normal over the space of the day. Our daughter wears her mi sight lenses from wake up to bed time and has the same vision throughout.

Finally, mi sight disposables are around £40 a month - not sure what the cost of the others are.

Finally, I went through a whole raft of emotions about this with floods of tears on a call with the optician. I have been in bits over the past two years about it.

In the end, short sightedness can be managed and, easier said than done, but please try not to worry. Kids are ultra resilient and able to cope. I think misight is good to -6 and then there are other similar options beyond that.

My worry hasn't helped a single bit...

Hope this has helped.

Thank you! This helps a lot!

Our daughter if it may help, had started to say recently that she didn't like the look of her glasses on her anymore and this may bode well for encouraging her to switch to lenses! For me the difficulty my be in the future if she says goes away for a longer period without us and needs assistance. Though then the backup lenses and glasses will hopefully help.

They get more confident with putting them in and taking the out - my daughter coped without any problems from about a month in.

The optician will not prescribe unless your daughter can put in and remove independently - it's a little bit of a painful exercise but, in my view, worth persevering with.

Good luck on the next steps....

These options were too late for us as DC older but anyone looking at this thread atropine trials are currently happening in the UK. E.g. paediatrics.medschl.cam.ac.uk/research/clinical-trials/cambridge-eye-research-centre-studies/

One further thing, we have got into the habit of telling clubs and schools etc that Chloe wears contact lenses. They typically have an adult in attendance who's in the same boat so she gets support that way.

One final thing, her friends think it's cool that she wears contact lenses and are more than happy to watch her remove them! Kids are strange sometimes! That said, whatever it takes!

@gambitt my DC11 started wearing misight contact lens since 8. She struggled a lot initially with putting the lenses in. I'm also a contact lens wearer and I was able to give a lot of practical help when DH can't. For the first 6 months, she ripped a lot of lenses, lost them at school, needed eye drops to 'flush' out irritation, etc. (I don't know how anyone lost a contact lens while wearing them. I can only guess she rubbed her eyes). She will take 10-15min to put them in before school in the beginning.

She's very used to them now and have no complaints. She's happy to wear them all day 7 days a week.

Experience is all positive. I wouldn't know if it's all worth the money until she becomes an adult and her myopia stops getting worse. If she ends up with a lesser prescription then me, then I think it's a good result.

When she was 8, there was no 'glasses' alternative. (I don't remember the name). But if it was available, I wouldn't put her on contacts so young. I would have chosen the glasses first, and let her decide to move to contacts when she is more ready.

Also, DC has been to school residentials and guides camp. She's able to do her contacts herself. I let the leaders know as part of her medical form just in case.

We have had good experiences with the mi sight lenses so far. Both of my sons are wearing them and their prescriptions haven't changed since they started. With my younger son, it was very difficult for him to learn to put the lenses in himself and it was a long, painful process. My older son picked it up almost straight away. We find the lenses very convenient and easy to manage in most situations. Swimming might be the only slight drawback as they have to be taken out. There are occasional mornings when the boys find their lenses won't "settle" and they have to work at it or sometimes get a new lens. I think the risk of infection is slightly reduced by the fact that the lenses are daily disposables. Overall, the boys are happy wearing the lenses and can manage them themselves.

My daughter has been wearing the Misight lenses for almost a year. She struggles to put them in so I put them in and she's never had a problem taking them out. She hasn't had any irritation issues at all, the only issue has been that they've fallen out a few times if she's cried and then rubbed her eyes after - she seems to have worked out how to rub her eyes and keep the contacts in now as they haven't fallen out for months. She wears them 6 days a week, with one day off a week - the optician said the eyes need one day off a week to 'breathe', I don't wear contacts myself so I've just followed all his advice. I'm waiting until the Easter holidays to have her try again to put them in herself - hopefully she'll be able to manage it now she's a bit older and won't be rushed in the mornings. She absolutely loves wearing them and her prescription went up by 0.25 in her last sight test earlier this month - before she started wearing them it was going up by about 1.0 each year so they do seem to be slowing down the progression of myopia.

Just wanted to add that we've had a similar experience as mark-dad-2022, the only difference being that our optician is happy for me to put in the contacts as my daughter was really struggling with it - he said he wouldn't prescribe them if she couldn't take them out, just in case they were irritating her or I wasn't with her on the odd evening, but putting them in herself wasn't such an issue health-wise. She has always found it really easy to take them out so luckily there hasn't been a problem there.