ARVO 2025: 8 year retrospective of DIMS spectacle lens in children

At ARVO 2025, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Carly Lam, PhD, MSc, and Tsz Wing Leung, PhD talked about the evaluation of the visual performance of 2 modified DIMS spectacle lens designs

Video Transcript:

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

Carly Lam, PhD, MSc:

Hello. I am Carly Lam, adjunct professor from the School of Optometry at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I'm very pleased here to share some exciting results. As you know, our study began with a 2 year randomized clinical trial involving children 8 to 13 years. And in this trial, we found 60% of myopia control efficacy in reducing the axial elongation. And after the completion of this trial, many children continue to wear the DIMS lenses, and therefore we continue to follow them up, and we track changes in axial length and also in myopia progression over a total of 8 years. And the results of the year 8 was encouraging. We found among the 63 children who came back for the follow up, those that continue to wear DIMS lenses for 8 years have significantly less myopia progression and less axial elongation. And there were 11 children who continue wearing the DIMS lens for over 8 years. Their overall myopia progression was just about half a diopter and axial elongation was about .5 millimeter. So this is actually much better than the normal progression in the age match norms. So we also follow them up on how their experience of this trial. So 75 participants completed our online survey. Among them, 62% of those who have worn DIMS lens for 6 years continue to 8 years. So this is very supportive data that the children like the DIMS spectacles. So we also found that during year 6 to year 8, there were no side effects recorded, so indicating that DIMS spectacle lens is effective and safe option for myopia control.

Tsz Wing Leung, PhD:

I'm Tsz Wing Leung from the School of Optometry of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. I'm an assistant professor in there. So I'm very excited about this 6 year project. So besides the quantitative data on the axial elongation, as far as the myopia progression, we also have the qualitative data. We have a structured interview for our participants about their comfort as well as their willingness of recommendation, our DIMS specticle lenses to others. So from the whole qualitative analysis, what we found is that, in general, they may have a little bit of the adaptation period, but it wouldn't be quite long. Usually it's about 1-2 days, and the longest one will be like 2-3 weeks. And then they can adapt to the lenses. And then, when we are asking about the comfort, they're all satisfied with the comfort, although at the very beginning they have some feeling about blurred vision at the periphery. But again, after some times of adaptation, most of them can adapt to the lenses. And then they used to wear the lenses for full time, except for some sports or when they sleep or shower otherwise, they wear them for full time without any problem. They also told us that they don't have any problems in the social interaction. None of them, or none of their peer have some interesting or some weird feeling about their new lenses, because they look like normal lenses. And in general, all the participants were satisfied with the lenses. They also told us that they would recommend the lenses to others because they think that the lenses were safe and also effective in controlling myopia progression.

Carly Lam, PhD, MSc:

We are surprised that the trial has gone down the road for 8 years, and children are now—they started at 8 to 13, so now they are 11 to 19. So we expect that when they are older, the myopia progression will be less and probably will stop. But then, when we analyze the data from year 6 to year 8, and there are some children who continue DIMS lenses and some did not, and switched back to single vision. When we compare the 2 groups, we still see a difference in the axial growth. So continuing to wear DIMS lens will continue to protect the eye from further axial growth and myopia progression. So in a way, I think it would be good that the children can continue to wear the lens until even beyond adolescent. As we know, they are also late onset myopia, and so that could also apply to those groups.

Tsz Wing Leung, PhD:

So from our current data or other previous study, we know that when the children get myopia at the very early age, usually they have a faster progression of the myopia. And from our data about the effectiveness of the DIMS spectacle lenses, we found that it's very effective, and therefore we will recommend an early intervention. That means they wear the lenses at a very early age, then it should provide a better benefit for protecting against myopia development. I think one more thing that we can add from our data is that although we found that longer wearing of the lenses should provide an additional benefit to protect against myopia development, however, it couldn't explain everything. There should be other things in between this 8 year period. Throughout the 8 year period, we have the COVID, we have different lifestyle, as you just mentioned it, and therefore I believe other things should take into account. And for those who are urban area children, because of those different lifestyle, we believe they should have an additional benefit. And it will be interesting to compare between the urban and also the rural area and how this will affect the myopia development as well as the effectiveness of the lenses.