Presbyopia: goodbye to glasses in the future?
It would seem to be an increasingly concrete possibility, that of having an alternative treatment for presbyopia and finally saying goodbye to glasses. Apparently, a drug, still being tested, but which is giving excellent feedback and could be on the market as early as 2023, would be enough.
Eye drops to correct presbyopia
Presbyopia is a vision difficulty that arises with aging, already between the ages of 40 and 50, and does not allow you to focus on objects up close, due to a stiffening of the crystalline lens. Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, is developing a new drug UNR844 that has already passed the first tests brilliantly, as announced at a press conference held in Basel.
The encouraging results were obtained during a study conducted in 2018. The sample of 75 people, all suffering from presbyopia, used eye drops obtaining a visible improvement in 82% of cases (as opposed to other patients treated with a placebo). The drug UNR844 would therefore improve visual acuity allowing you to reach a value of 20/40, absolutely satisfactory to be able to recover near vision.
The drops for presbyopia instilled in the eye penetrate the lens and allow you to regain elasticity, so as to improve vision and avoid the use of glasses. The eye drops should be put on several times a day and for life.
At the base of the drug is alpha lipoic acid, an anti-oxidant and reducing agent, which allows the sulfide bonds that form between the proteins of the lens to be broken with advancing age. By dissolving these bonds, the lens regains elasticity and therefore also improves accommodation.
In reality, the cause of presbyopia is not unique but linked to several factors, in addition to the loss of elasticity of the lens. We refer in particular to:
- increased viscosity of the vitreous body
- ciliary body that atrophies
- increase in lens volume
At the moment, the drug UNR844 acts only on the improvement of the lens, an action that would seem to already give satisfactory results.
The recommended use in the initial phase is at least three months, and then monitor the progress of the situation. Furthermore, it seems that if eye drops are used early, without reaching cataracts, it should be able to delay it as well as prevent the formation of nuclear cataracts secondary to sclerosis.
The treatment of presbyopia is a very interesting area of study, since it involves a large portion of the population. In this regard, there is also a hope for a cure for myopia (beyond surgery), which is increasingly widespread even among children.
To tell the truth, there are already experiments in this sense, at the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials of Bar-ILan University in Tel Aviv. The technology used by myopia drops is that of Nano-Drops , which involves installing nano-drops in the eye that perform the function of a contact lens. Entering the eye, the nano-drops are able to adjust the corneal refractive index, improving visual capacity.
