In 2023, an annual consciousness marketing campaign on dry eye illness was launched in Italy in collaboration with 400 ophthalmology clinics and hospital departments and with the assist of AbbVie.
We named the marketing campaign “Vediamoci rOSa” (“See pink”), during which the 2 central letters of “rosa,” OS, are an acronym for “occhio secco,” Italian for “dry eye.” Targets of our marketing campaign had been ladies and physicians, not simply ophthalmologists however household medical doctors, gynecologists, endocrinologists, oncologists and all different well being care professionals concerned in ladies’s well being.
The pathogenesis of dry eye is complicated, multifactorial and infrequently associated to a deep hormonal imbalance that impacts ladies within the menopausal and postmenopausal age but in addition youthful ladies who’re present process adjuvant endocrine remedy for breast most cancers. These youthful ladies, who expertise life-altering menopausal signs resulting from extended estrogen suppression, want correct and competent counseling to deal with the various bodily and psychological points that usually neither the sufferers themselves nor the gynecologist or the oncologist handle as a result of they seem negligible with respect to most cancers survival.
Dry eye generally is a breach into this world of usually unexpressed experiences and emotions, and we, as ophthalmologists, might be the primary to set in movement a multidisciplinary means of care. We may also be the turning level in differentiating Sjögren’s syndrome from dry eye that outcomes from hormone modifications. As I say to lots of the sufferers who’re referred to me, Sjögren’s is a uncommon situation. We would see it a few times in our profession, whereas normally, dry eye in ladies 50 years and older is evaporative hormone-related dry eye, way more simply managed with out exposing our sufferers to pointless corticosteroid remedy.
We all know from many research that the attention can mirror a number of systemic situations. On a couple of event, I’ve been the primary to diagnose polycystic ovary syndrome in sufferers who got here to me with itchy eyes and attribute mucous filaments on the floor. I referred these sufferers to a gynecologist who was in a position to affirm the analysis with an ultrasound scan and hormone stage evaluation. And in males, we’re ready in some instances to make a primary analysis of testicular carcinoma from dry eye with alterations of mucin expression.
Women and men are completely different: They’ve completely different hormonal ranges and cycles, completely different life and dietary wants, and completely different illness shows and responses to remedies. These variations should be thought of and appropriately managed in our observe as in all different fields of medication. Gender-specific medication is the long run and is a prerequisite for precision medication, a brand new patient-centered, multidisciplinary, customized method to well being care.
For extra info:
Antonio Di Zazzo, MD, affiliate professor of ophthalmology at Campus Bio-Medico College Hospital, Rome, might be reached at a.dizazzo@policlinicocampus.it.
