We had a nice consultation for a patient who has keratoconus in each eye today!
This keratoconus patient noticed that his vision has declined over the past few months and is in search of a contact lens option to help him see better. He does have a history of hybrid contact lenses, but he had an experience where he could not remove the lens and had to go to the emergency room to get it removed. For that reason, he is seeking other options. Hybrid contact lenses have a corneal gas permeable lens in the center, and then they have a soft contact lens skirt. In theory, you get the vision of a hard contact lens, with the comfort of a soft contact lens.
After reviewing his images from today, we noticed that his retinal health was unremarkable, and his corneas were relatively clear in each eye. For these reasons, we felt a specialty contact lens would be a very good option for him to improve his vision.
Due to his concern for comfort, we decided to fit him into the Latitude scleral lens. The Latitude scleral lens is a very custom lens, made specific to each patient's eye. First, we use an instrument called the sMap 3D. This device captures the curvature of the entire eye by using a special dye, called sodium fluorescein. The device requires the patient to look up, look down, and look straight ahead. The device captures images in all of the 3 different gazes and stitches the images together to create a 3D image of the surface of the entire eye. The laboratory then uses this information to design an incredibly custom scleral lens.
With a diagnostic scleral lens, he was able to achieve 20/25 in the right eye and 20/20 in the left eye! He also mentioned the comfort was already better than some of the lenses he has tried in the past.
We are looking forward to receiving his lenses and seeing how they fit.
Grateful to be able to help keratoconus patients see better!
