“Can my child successfully wear contact lenses?”

It’s a question many parents ask their eye doctor when their kids want contacts. In this month’s Contact Lens Spectrum, Jeffrey Walline, OD, PhD, and Marjorie Rah, OD, PhD, discuss some of the factors associated with the success (or lack of success) children have when attempting to wear contact lenses.

Recent research suggests that more than 90 percent of children ages 8 to 14 can successfully adapt to wearing soft contact lenses. Because of this high success rate, most children who are interested in contact lenses choose soft lenses.

With gas permeable contact lenses (also called GP contacts), it’s a different story. The success rate fitting children with GP lenses is approximately 55 percent. For this reason, Drs. Walline and Rah say more careful screening of candidates for these lenses may be beneficial.

In a study published in 2009, Dr. Walline found that most children who were unable to adapt to contact lens wear tend to stop wearing the lenses within the first few weeks. But is was unclear to the researchers if these children simply chose not to wear the GP lenses frequently enough and long enough to adapt to them, or if contact lens discomfort or other factors made adapting to the lenses impossible, and this was the reason they wore the lenses less than those who were successful.

From their personal experience fitting children with contacts, the authors have found that children who are squeamish about having their eyes or eyelids touched by their doctor during an eye exam are less likely to succeed with contact lens wear. Children with small eye openings, poor dexterity or poor hygiene also are less likely to wear contacts successfully.

Parents also are a factor in a child’s success wearing contacts, according to the doctors. Parents who are involved without being overbearing offer the best support environment for their kids to wear contacts successfully, they say.

Dr. Walline is an assistant professor at Ohio State University College of Optometry, where he conducts studies of pediatric contact lens wear. Dr. Rah is a staff optometrist at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary Contact Lens Service, where she specializes in medically necessary contact lenses and advanced contact lens designs.

A study published in a recent issue of Eye & Contact Lens indicates that children ages 8 to 12 are able to successfully wear daily disposable contacts and that most children in the study preferred wearing contact lenses to wearing eyeglasses.

The three-month study was conducted in Singapore, following a protocol similar to the recent Contact Lenses in Pediatrics (CLIP) study in the United States that found similar results among teenagers.

Participants in the study were fit with 1-Day Acuvue and 1-Day Acuvue for Astigmatism disposable contacts. All children were nearsighted (with or without astigmatism) and had not worn contact lenses prior to the study.

Of the 59 children enrolled, 53 (90 percent) completed the study successfully. At the end of the three-month study period, most of the children and their parents reported preferring the contact lenses to eyeglasses for a variety of reasons, including vision, comfort and appearance.

No eye infections occurred during the study, and the only adverse event noted was the development of a chalazion in one child’s eyelid.

(Many eye doctors recommend daily disposable contacts for children who want to wear contact lenses because the single-use lenses eliminate the need for daily lens care and contact lens solutions.)

Eye & Contact Lens is the official journal of the Contact Lens Association of Ophthalmologists.