Dry eye disease (DED) affects hundreds of millions of people throughout the world and is one of the most frequent causes of patient visits to eye care practitioners. (DED = Dry Eye Disease)
1．Classification
2．Effectiveness
Currently, the treatment of DED is summarized as follows, and it is mainly the treatment to provide alternative tears and increase the tears. Therefore, we can see how important it is to increase tears in improving DED.
1．Effectiveness to DED of Aqueous Tear Deficiency Type (to increasing Tear Fluid)
In DED, various factors affect the eye surface, causing easy destruction of the tear layer on the cornea, causing eye discomfort and visual dysfunction.
However, the destruction of the tear layer stimulates the sensory nerves on the corneal surface, causing reflective tear secretion. As a result of the increase in the thickness of the tear layer on the corneal surface due to the secretion and increased tears, it is less likely to destroy the tear layer.
This reflex lacrimal secretion is composed of long neural loops and lacrimal glands consisting of trigeminal-parasympathetic nerves and is called the “Reflex Loop-Lacrimal Gland System”.
“Reflex Loop-Lacrimal Gland System” works to cancel the destruction of the tear layer by providing tear fluid.
The mechanism of Refresh Technology EW is that the electrical stimulation generated by the current parameters in Refresh Technology EW increases the input to the afferent nerve path (trigeminal nerve), which is an indirect modification to the central nervous system, increasing stimulation to the efferent nerve pathway (especially parasympathetic nerves) and increasing tears.
Refresh Technology EW focuses on this Reflex Loop-lacrimal gland system, stimulating the trigeminal nerve and directly stimulating the lacrimal glands.
Although the types of efferent nerves involved in this reflex response have not been identified, we believe that parasympathetic nerves play an important role as well as the opinions of many scholars.
2．Retrospective effects of increased tear fluid on other factors
- One of the causes of mucin abnormality type is frictional disorder, and the increase in tears leads to friction reduction, first of all, the effect on the mucin reduction type is mentioned.
- Since there is tear deficiency as one of the causes of the tear dynamics abnormality type, the effect on the tear dynamics abnormality type by the tear increase is mentioned as the second.
Effect of improving blood flow
Refresh Technology EW can give the eye refreshment, which is equal to relaxing, giving the parasympathetic nerve dominance and promoting blood flow above common low frequencies. This leads to the activation of cells throughout the eye, which is a secondary effect on DED.