TearLab Corporation

Refractive Dry Eye Disease

A recent phenomenon that has increased the number of patients suffering from Dry Eye Disease (DED) is vision correction surgery. The most common procedure performed to correct nearsightedness or farsightedness is called Laser-Assisted In Situ Keratomileusis or LASIK. During surgery, a flap is cut across the cornea to enable the surgeon to direct a laser beam to deeper tissue in order to reshape the cornea. When surgery concludes, the flap is then repositioned.

Sectioning the flap severs the nerve fibers of the cornea, resulting in an interruption of the signals that are important for directing tear production. As a consequence, over 50% of LASIK patients report dry eye symptoms post- operatively and approximately 18% show signs of longer-term, chronic DED. Approximately 1.5 million LASIK procedures are performed annually.

Ophalmologists and co-managing optometrists have generally treated LASIK patients' post-op dry eye complaints as they have developed. Some physicians are rethinking that approach by proactively treating dry eye before LASIK in order to mitigate the risks of post-operative dry eye and to provide patients with a greater refractive predictability. TearLab could be an important tool for the eye care practitioner in identifying those patients that could benefit from therapy prior to undergoing the procedure to improve post-operative outcomes and to mitigate the risks of post-operative complications, thus establishing TearLab™ as a pre-operative screen. TearLab™ could also be integral to the post-operative examination to objectively track patient outcomes and identify those patients that require ongoing dry eye disease management.