Clinical Minute: How to Classify Presbyopia by Severity

Announcer:
You’re listening to Eye on Ocular Health on ReachMD, and this episode is part of our Clinical Minute series. Here’s your host, Dr. Neda Shamie.

Dr. Shamie:
In this "Clinical Minute," we'll be discussing a literature review and panel discussion that’s sought to develop a consensus statement on the classification of presbyopia by severity. Dr. Marguerite McDonald is here to discuss the results.

Marguerite, thank you so much for being here to discuss this fantastic paper. Now with presbyopia drops becoming available to us, this is a very important paper. Can you share with us what inspired you to write this paper?

Dr. McDonald: 
Well, Neda, thank you for having me. That is exactly what inspired us. We said, let's look at the literature. The co-authors and I, we looked at the literature to see has anybody classified it. And surprisingly, no one had classified it by severity. Amazing. So we decided that we would review the literature and put together a consensus paper.

And the bottom line is that while you can use age as a screening tool, the best way to categorize is a severity of presbyopia is by the add that is required. It's amazing. There are young people who require a high add, there are older people who require a low add. So age is a great screening tool, but you just can't write that glasses script based on their age alone. So we said under 1.25 is mild presbyopia, if you need an add of 1.25 to 2, that's moderate, and above 2 is severe.

Dr. Shamie: 
And this is going to be very useful as we have more, you know, different presbyopia drops, potentially classifying which one will be best for which category of presbyopia patients.

Dr. McDonald:
That was our hope.

Dr. Shamie:
Fantastic. Thank you so much for this and many other contributions you've made to the science of ophthalmology.

Dr. McDonald:
Thank you, Neda.

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