Supracutaneous Treatment of Dry Eye Patients with Calcium Carbonate

Abstract

The general mode of treatment of ocular conditions has not changed in thousands of years, ie, it has required the instillation of aqueous preparations or ointments onto the ocular surface or into the inferior cul de sac. These methods have many inherent problems: instillation difficulties, reflex washout from the solution’s temperature and pH, eventual irritation from preservative ingredients required by multiple-dose aqueous preparations, wash-out of resident tear biomolecules, difficulty in resuspension of insoluble components, marked absorption across the large, permeable conjunctival surface, short duration of action, and vision blurring from ointments. There have been numerous attempts to mitigate some of these problems, e.g., addition of viscosity-increasing agents, creation of slowly soluble inserts, aerosolized delivery methods, single-use unpreserved solutions, etc. None, however, has addressed all of these problems.