What's Dry Eye Syndrome?

By Dr. Dax Eckard


Dry eye symptoms differ quite a bit. A few of the most common dry eye symptoms are burning, stinging, redness, and a sandy, gritty type of sensation in the eye. A great deal of individuals will say "I feel like I've a foreign object or some thing in my eye." Some people even complain of extreme tearing, although they've dry eye syndrome.

The diagnosis of dry eye can differ from individual to individual. Dry eyes could be a simple factor for some patients, and it can be a chronic, ongoing illness for other people. Some individuals have very mild symptoms, while other patients are debilitated by them. My suggestion is: when they observe that their eyes are not comfortable, regardless of what they believe it is, they need to get a consultation with their eye physician to determine, simply because it could be some thing else entirely. Eye discomfort could indicate an allergic response, an infection or, quite commonly, it's dry eye. They need to be looked at so some type of treatment program may be initiated.

There are various kinds of dry eye syndrome. There can be a genuine lack of tear production, a deficient quantity of tears on the ocular surface; or there may be an adequate amount of tears produced, but they are not sticking to the ocular surface. This could happen when the make up of tear layers is unbalanced, which tends to make them evaporate too rapidly and consequently less efficient.

Daily environmental conditions can make dry eye worse. This could include a basic side effect of medications the patient takes, exposure to chemicals within the surroundings, or heaters / air conditioners.

Throughout a dry eye exam, the physician will look at the eye under magnification using a slit lamp. Utilizing this 3D microscope, we can examine the different components from the eye, including the corneal surface, blood vessels in the side of the eye, eye lids, oil glands on the eyelid at the point exactly where the lashes go in to the skin, as well as looking for the volume of moisture that the eye produces. For enhanced views of these and other structures and tears, we could use fluorescein dye drops. There are also small testing strips for calculating the amount from the patient's tears, known as a Schirmer's test. Certainly one of the newer dry eye tests that we do at our office is the TearLab(R) Osmolarity Test, using instrumentation in the corner of the eye to figure out the volume and level of quality of the tears.




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