ARVO 2025: Efficacy of DIMS lenses in slowing myopic shifts among pre-myopic preschoolers

At ARVO 2025, in Salt Lake City, Utah, Hsin-Yu Yang talked about the 9-month results from her study on the effectiveness of DIMS spectral lenses in myopic retardation for the pre-myopic preschoolers in Taiwan.

Video Transcript:

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

Hsin-Yu Yang:

Hello, I'm Hsin-Yu Yang from Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Yuanshan branch, and it's my pleasure to introduce my study. My study is effectiveness of DIMS spectral lenses in myopic retardation for the pre-myopic preschoolers pilot study for nine months. Instead of treating the children who has already been myopic, in this study, we are trying to focus on the children who are not myopic yet, but they are in a high risk of developing myopia in the future. So in this study, we choose pre-myopic children, most of them with a history of parental myopia, which is a strong risk factor of developing myopia in the near future. We recruited 24 children in this study, we asked them to wear the plain old photochromic DIMS lens spectacles part-time, especially at [inaudible] for nine months.

First, we will check if the compliance is good, and then we have some myopic parameters to check if there is good control of myopia. And also we will calculate the incidence of myopia over nine months. The result turns out to be nice with this pilot study, as the spherical equivalent is stable with mild hyperopic shift over nine months. And the second, the compliance of wearing glasses for these pre-myoptic children is good. As there is not a big complaint or anything that is troublesome for them, and the parents agree to keep wearing these DIMS spectacles longer. At last, the instance of myopia after wearing the spectacles is very low, and the children will keep wearing it, and we will see what will happen in the future.

Yeah, about the inclusion criteria first, because we want to intervene for the children who are younger, because for younger children who will develop myopia earlier, it will become high myopia, usually in the future. So we focus on the children who is aged five to seven years old, and their [inaudible] vertical equivalent is around plus one to minus .75 which is a definition of IMI for pre-myopia. And the third, they should have good vision without significant astigmatism or some other ocular disease.

Okay, because our children are preschoolers, so they don't go to elementary school. They go to preschool or kindergartens. Their lifestyle, usually they don't write, but they go outside, outdoor activities. They are drawing like something, but usually in a Taiwanese setting, after elementary school, there will be a strong rise of myopia, or myopic shift afterwards, because there is increased scholar burden, homework and exams. So why we want to intervene is to change that, to preserve their hyperopic reservation beforehand, just to maintain the hyperopic reservation as more as possible. Because these children are in a kindergarten, so first we ask them to wear the glasses for just part-time, especially at near work. But after entering elementary school the next year, as our study, we will ask them to wear full-time, as there is a sudden rise of the risk of myopia development and some near work increase. So at the first year, we will ask them to wear part-time, like our study results like this and the second year will ask them to wear full-time, including the daytime, afternoon and evening.