EyeCon 2022: Advances in presbyopia

Mile Brujic, OD, FAAO, in private practice in Bowling Green, Ohio; and owner of Optometric Insights, sat down with Optometry Times' Emily Kaiser to discuss key takeaways from his presentation titled, "Advances presbyopia," which he co-presented with Marc R. Bloomenstein, OD, FAAO, during EyeCon 2022 held in Marco Island, Flordida.

This transcript has been edited for clarity:

Kaiser:

Hello, I'm Emily Kaiser with Optometry Times, and I'm sitting down with Dr. Mile Brujic to discuss his presentation on advances in presbyopia at EyeCon 2022 in Marco Island, Florida. Welcome Dr. Brujic, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Brujic:

Thank you. I'm really glad to be here.

Kaiser:

Can you give us a brief overview of your presentation?

Brujic:

Yep. So presbyopia is changing, and it's changing fast.

I mean, there are surgical options, there's contact lens options, there's pharmaceutical options, and it's the most common condition that we see in our practices.

Everybody by the age of 50 is presbyopic and they're all looking for options and treatment options, and we now have a plethora of of them. So we go over all of those throughout the discussion, and also how sometimes we can layer some of those contemporary treatment options to actually get patients to better clinical outcomes.

Kaiser:

Fantastic. And how should clinicians respond to this information?

Brujic:

You know, my wish, when whenever I give any talk on any topic is that the clinician and the audience gets two pieces of information.

The first is helping them understand some technologies that they may not necessarily be familiar with.

And the second and more importantly, how does that fit into their clinics and their roles when they're caring for patients? And how does that fit into their strategy when they're treating or seeing these patients?

If those two key points are hit on—again, understanding the new technologies and figuring out how those fit into their own clinical practices—I think any continuing education is truly a success.

Kaiser:

And what do you hope that optometrists take away from your talk?

Brujic:

You know, the biggest thing I hope they take away are the clinical pearls.

We all kind of have to understand or know about the technology, but the real kind of clinical pearls is the implementation of these things, and again, how some of them can actually be layered on top of each other to actually enhance patient outcomes, as well.