ARVO 2025: 12-month results in myopic children using combination treatment of atropine and DIMS spectacle lenses

At ARVO 2025, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Noemi Guemes-Villahoz, MD, PhD, talked about 12-month results of vision-related quality of life in myopic children using combination treatment with atropine and DIMS (Defocus Incorporated Multiple Segments) spectacle lenses.

Video Transcript:

Editor's note: The below transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Noemi Guemes-Villahoz, MD, PhD:

Hello. My name is Noemi Guemes. I am an ophthalmologist. I work in hospital clinical San Carlos in Madrid, Spain. This hospital is a tertiary hospital that belongs to the public health care system, and we are here presenting our work. This is a randomized control trial. The aim of this randomized control trial is to evaluate and compare the efficacy of combination treatment with atropine eye drops, 0.025 percent and single vision lenses compared to atropine eye drops and DIMS spectacle lenses.

We included 2 groups. One group of children, myopic children, is wearing atropine eyedrops plus single vision. The other atropine eye drops with DIMS lenses. Both of the groups were using atropine 0.025 percent. This is a 2-year randomized control trial, and we are presenting the results for the 1 year follow-up. What we found is that the axial length increased less in the combination group. The increase was 0.07 millimeters versus 0.18 millimeters in the monotherapy group. However, in terms of spherical equivalent refraction, we did find some differences. So the combination treatment progressed less. However, those differences were not significant, statistically significant. Additionally, we found that almost 4 out of 10 children in the combination group had no progression in terms of axial length over 12 months. This study has a lot of implications for clinical practice, but also, this is the first randomized control trial that evaluates combination treatment in European children. So the implications for this is, nowadays myopic children need to wear glasses either way, so we use atropine as well. So it's very nice to combine both treatments together, especially if we are going to get better efficacy.