A recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll revealed how dry eye affects the quality of life of the patients who live with it. Jessilin Quint, OD, MBA, FAAO, from Smart Eye Care, and Rebecca Petris, co-founder of the Dry Eye Foundation, spoke with AJMC about these results and their biggest takeaways.

Transcript

What were your biggest takeaways from the State of Dry Eye survey conducted by The Harris Poll?

Quint: There’s a lot of statistics in that but one thing that really jumped out after reading those survey results was that a lot of patients didn’t realize that the symptoms that they were having were in fact dry eye. And so I think that just goes to show how all of us can have a little bit more awareness. And to help kind of educate our patients on if you do have any of those symptoms, that it can be really helpful. I also really liked that now there’s a really awesome resource out there, Knowyourdryeye.com, which is a really great kind of landing space for patients that if they aren’t sure for their symptoms, or aren’t really sure kind of how to kind of get that initial information, that in addition to seeing an eye care provider and reaching out to your organization is fantastic at raising different dry eye awarenesses, that can be really important.

Petris: We were super happy to see the Harris Poll results too, because they echoed what we’ve been experiencing all this time, right, which is how much this can affect people’s quality of life. I think most people have never experienced this. They hear dry eye, and it just sounds so trivial. There’s no escaping how minor that sounds, right. But there’s dry eye in the sense of these casual symptoms you might experience on a bad day: didn’t get enough sleep, spent the day at the beach, or whatever. Big difference between that and actual disease that’s really impacting life. And people don’t know that they can move from the one category to the other. So getting the word out is really important.

Quint: Absolutely. In that poll, there was one statistic that said like 46% of those that took the survey reported that they could actually hear themselves blink. And so you know, that’s something that when you think about that, like you really shouldn’t have to think about your eyes throughout the day. So if somebody’s thinking about their eyes like that there are tools out there to address that, to treat that. And I like that you pointed out like sometimes patients don’t realize that there are tools out there, right. And so they just kind of keep making excuses for it. And then it turns into this more advanced disease process. But any disease process is much easier to treat and address if it’s earlier on in that disease process, or, you know, even just being preventative and talking with their eye care providers about different prevention tactics can be really helpful.