Dry eyes common in older Koreans

(Reuters Health) - One in three elderly Koreans have dry eyes, according to a new study.
The findings, published this week in the Archives of Ophthalmology, also show that women and people living in urban areas are more likely to report symptoms of so-called dry eye disease.
Either "your tear glands are not making enough tears to keep your eyes moist (or) you're making enough tears but they evaporate too quickly," said Scot Moss, who has studied dry eye at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health but was not involved in the new work.
For the study, Dr. Ki Woong Kim of Seoul National University Bundang Hospital and colleagues surveyed 657 older Koreans living in the city of Yongin, as part of larger study on aging. Those participants were 72 years old, on average, and most lived independently.
Using a questionnaire, the researchers determined how many had dry eye symptoms, including gritty, sandy, or burning sensations in the eye, as well as watering and tearing or redness. They also brought a smaller group of the participants in for eye evaluations.
About a third of the people surveyed said they had at least one of the dry eye symptoms often or all the time in the past 2 weeks.
Women were more likely to suffer from dry eye -- 35 percent of them reported symptoms, compared to 26 percent of men. And about 36 percent of people living in urban regions complained of dry eye, versus 24 percent of those from rural areas of Yongin.
Those variations could be due to differences in sex hormones that may affect the eye, and pollution or different workplace environments in the city compared to the country, the authors suggested.
Estimates of the frequency of dry eye have varied widely, the researchers noted, but some studies have suggested that the chance of having dry eye increases with age, and that Asians may be more at risk than white Americans.
Moss said that it's been hard to compare dry eye rates among different populations because there's no standard way to diagnose the condition.
"It's very possible there are differences among different ethnic groups," he told Reuters Health. "There are different climates, there are different work environments, diets, lifestyles -- a whole host of things."
Moss also added that before someone can be diagnosed with dry eye, other conditions that produce similar symptoms, such as allergies, have to be ruled out.
Dry eye can be treated with eye drops, as well as special contact lenses and even plugs to close the tear ducts.
Kim and colleagues did not find a strong link between participants' dry eye symptoms and the results of their eye exams, showing that typical tests done by ophthalmologists might not be good at screening for the condition.
And they concluded that more research is needed to better understand dry eye, especially given how common it proved to be in their research.
SOURCE: bit.ly/lNjbln Archives of Ophthalmology, online May 9, 2011.