EyeDropAlarm has been featured in several publications including Ophthalmology Times and Glaucoma Today. It was recommended as the "Top App for Patients" at the American Academy of Ophthalmology Annual Meeting and is the most popular eyedrop reminder app in the world. It is the only app that can automatically create a tapering schedule and programs a gap between drops scheduled for the same time.
Why is it important to take your eye medications as prescribed?
For people with glaucoma, missing or mistiming prescribed eye drops leads to irreversible vision loss (Sleath et al., 2011). In a study evaluating glaucoma patients over an average of 7.3 years, researchers found a dose-response relationship between missing medication and the deterioration of a patient's visual field (Newman-Casey et al., 2020).
Why is it necessary to wait at least 5 minutes between instilling eye drops prescribed at the same time?
It is due to the physiological limitations of the human ocular surface and the pharmacokinetics of topical drug absorption. When a second drop is instilled shortly after the first, it triggers an immediate overflow. The excess fluid is rapidly evacuated via the nasolacrimal duct (Agrahari et al., 2016) and physiological tear turnover (Agarwal et al., 2021). Consequently, the second drop physically "washes out" the first before it has had sufficient time to penetrate the cornea. Waiting at least 5 minutes has been scientifically proven to make each medication more clinically effective (Denion et al., 2017).
REFERENCES: Newman-Casey, P. A., Niziol, L. M., Gillespie, B. W., Janz, N. K., Lichter, P. R., & Musch, D. C. (2020). The association between medication adherence and visual field progression in the Collaborative Initial Glaucoma Treatment Study. Ophthalmology, 127(4), 477–483. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2019.10.022
Sleath, B., Blalock, S., Covert, D., Stone, J. L., Skinner, A. C., Muir, K., & Robin, A. L. (2011). The relationship between glaucoma medication adherence, eye drop technique, and visual field defect severity. Ophthalmology, 118(12), 2398–2402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2011.05.013
Agrahari, V., Mandal, A., Agrahari, V., Trinh, H. M., Joseph, M., Ray, A., Hadji, H., Mitra, R., Pal, D., & Mitra, A. K. (2016). A comprehensive insight on ocular pharmacokinetics. Drug Delivery and Translational Research, 6, 735-754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13346-016-0339-2
Agarwal, P., Craig, J. P., & Rupenthal, I. D. (2021). Formulation Considerations for the Management of Dry Eye Disease. Pharmaceutics, 13(2), 207. https://doi.org/10.3390/pharmaceutics13020207
Denion, E., Charlot, F., & Béraud, G. (2017). A 5-Minute Interval between Two Dilating Eye Drops Increases Their Effect. Optometry and Vision Science, 94(8), 838-844. https://doi.org/10.1097/opx.0000000000001104
