Dry Eyes Syndrome

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. Jim Kirkconnell of Bellevue Eyecare Center in Nashville, Tennessee. There's a number of people that suffer with what's called dry eye syndrome. And the reason that dry eyes typically happen is because we have three layers of tears in our eyes, and the bottom layer is called mucin, and that's produced by thousands of individual cells on the white part of the eye. And then we have a watery layer that's in the middle that comes from the lacrimal gland, which is up here. That's the one that happens to cause all the watering when we cut onions. And then we have the oily layer on the...on the outside, which keeps the tears from evaporating. That comes from sebaceous glands that actually come at the base of the lashes. Most of the time, when somebody has a dry eye, it's the mucin cells that are giving out, and that just happens because of age, typically. And in order to get comfort, the usual thing to do is to use an...a dry eye product, which is an artificial tear. They come in just a regular type of thickness. They come in gel-type drops. And then they also come in gels, which are longer-lasting, but they blur the vision for anywhere from three to five minutes when you put it on. There's other things to do. If you have a severe dry eye and one thing is we have in the corner of our eye, we have something called a puncta because the tears on the bottom, that's called the lacrimal lake, and the tears actually drain into the puncta into a canal into the back of the nose. And in order to try to preserve your tears, what we can do in a severe case is we have silicon plugs to...in order to stop up that canal. It stops up 90 percent of it and it really helps when people have severe problems. Another treatment which has been out for about four years is a drug called Restasis. Now, Restasis is an NSAID that is cyclosporine, but it's a drop. It's not something that's taken orally. And that actually...it helps in regards to taking the cells that have given up...the mucin producers that gave up because of inflammation, it will perk them back up, given enough time. It actually takes about three months of treatment of taking a drop morning and evening for this to work. And I've seen it help a number of people. You do have to remember that it doesn't help you in a week -- it takes about three months of treatment for that. Other than that, the...you know, dry eye can happen from evaporation that is when you're in a windy conditions or you just are a person that does a lot of computer work. And when we do intense reading, we don't blink as often, and then the answer, once again, is still artificial tears. There are two types of dry eye, then primarily, it's either you have a problem with the cells are producing mucin or you have evaporative type of dry eye. And there are different treatments as far as different products and the goal is to match your problem and try to manage it economically because each step that is a little bit more long-lasting costs more."