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Quantel’s Quest against Dry Eye Disease

There’s good news in the fight against dry eye disease (DED). Quantel Medical (Cournon d’Auvergne, France) has created a new, patient-focused website dedicated to information on DED. We’re pleased to see the disease get the coverage it deserves, especially considering how increasingly prevalent it is. The website will help practitioners explain DED to their patients and will provide an arsenal of resources to help manage and reduce symptoms. 

DED is something that CAKE magazine has put a fair deal of emphasis on recently, and the ophthalmic community in general has been making significant strides in combating the condition. Quantel’s website — www.mydryeyedisease.com — promises to be one of the most valuable tools in DED information management to date. 

Let’s take a look at the website, and just how it’ll help both practitioners and patients. It’s pretty neat. 

Broad Appeal for a Widespread Condition

A host of causes has led DED to be far more common than it was just a few decades ago. A combination of allergens, lifestyle causes like screen use, an aging and increasingly urban population — and even mask use — have pushed DED rates up just about everywhere. 

At the same time, improving diagnosis techniques mean that the condition is detected at much higher rates than before, meaning it can be adequately treated. Higher rates worldwide reflect both trends. 

So, demand for information related to DED is at an all-time high. For that reason, Quantel is providing multiple versions of its website. Currently, it exists in English, French, Spanish and Polish

As Delphine Southon, product manager for dry eye range at Quantel Medical noted in the company’s press release, “The ophthalmologists that we work with told us that their patients were expressing a real need for information so that they could understand dry eye. So, we decided to develop this website to give ophthalmologists a practical tool, designed with their patients in mind, to support their conversations with patients.”

The website will be updated monthly with a host of information, ranging from causes of dry eye and populations affected to new treatments, studies and practical solutions. 

Quantel's Quest against Dry Eye Disease

Just how common is DED?

So we’ve mentioned that DED is common. But just how common it is often surprises even the most informed among us. 

According to Quantel — and we fully believe this statistic — DED visits account for roughly half of patients’ ophthalmic complaints. As the company also notes, roughly one in three French people suffer from DED, and in the U.S. DED sufferers number in the tens of millions. It’s more than just a minor irritation for many — the condition can have a serious negative effect on a person’s quality of life, and left untreated it can result in ocular damage. 

We can reasonably expect that DED rates will continue to increase worldwide, especially as populations age and urbanize. One of the most common causes of DED, demodex blepharitis infestation, is found in 84% of adults over 60 and 100% of adults over 70.¹ That’s just one cause among many — to cover them all, we’d need a website like Quantel’s. Thank goodness they’re putting that together. 

Modern Problems Require Modern Solutions

Although sharing videos of cats and people falling down would appear to many to be the prime purpose of the internet, idealists would argue that websites like Quantel’s utilize the web to its best potential. Disseminating DED knowledge  is a noble cause, and one we fully encourage. Ophthalmologists need all the support they can get, and patients will be able to have most of their questions answered. That’s a win all around. 

Reference: 

  1. Liu J, Sheha H, Tseng SC. Pathogenic role of Demodex mites in blepharitis. Curr Opin Allergy Clin Immunol. 2010;10(5):505-510. 
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