6 ms·

FDA approves eye drops that fix near vision without glasses

129 points by geox 1y ago

mcv 1y ago
Just when I was finally coming to grips with needing bifocals.
Mistletoe 1y ago
How much will these cost? I'd love some immediately. I'm starting to need reading glasses and it is really disruptive to my whole life, I do lots of hobbies that need close up vision and never knew what life was like not having it. Edit: "During the investor call, Lenz executives outlined the cost of VIZZ. A monthly, 25-pack will cost $79. A 3-month pack from the e-pharmacy will cost $198 ($66 per month). Samples are anticipated in the United States as early as October 2025, with commercial product to be broadly available by mid-Q4 2025."
- tguvot 1y ago
  priced just below higher end daily contacts. tempting. but i need more than 10 hours usually
- krupan 1y ago
  Versus $15 reading glasses that will last years if you are just slightly careful with them. Hmmm
  - zimpenfish 1y ago
    > Versus $15 reading glasses that will last years But the drops have the advantage of not messing with your distance vision like reading glasses do (unless you pay for varifocals, obvs.) - "[...] does not significantly affect the eye’s focusing muscles, so it doesn’t blur your distance vision [...]" For someone who has to switch between near and distance often, I can see the drops being useful, especially if your distance vision is fine and you don't need varifocals.
- roel_v 1y ago
  If you're mid-40s (which is the threshold ago where I am), and can afford the up front cost, consider IOL implants. Life changing (for me). (and re: costs, these drops are going to set you back $1000 a year as well, so after 7/8 years implants would be 'cheaper').
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    I’d really like those. My Mom got them and she said it didn’t help her near vision, which I didn’t understand. I guess she was a weird case because yeah I had just assumed that a new lens would fix the hardening of the lens with aging problem. Thanks for letting me know! How long should your new lenses last? Did they say? Will they eventually get hard like the human body’s lens or are you set for the rest of your life? It’s really cool you are part cyborg. Did you get a monofocal or multifocal lens?
    - yencabulator 1y ago
      Most artificial lenses, especially more than 5 years back, had a single focal point and did not adjust. You chose to either have near vision (mostly carless old people), far vision (and still use reading glasses), or blended vision (one eye far one near). The flexible lens stuff is still relatively new and there are reports of them sort of being like 80% focused 100% of the time, which can suck. Apparently lots of individual variability in results, where as the single-focus lenses are 60s technology and well figured out.
    - roel_v 1y ago
      I was told these lenses are for the rest of my life. I guess I'll know for sure in 40 years. They don't develop cataract like natural lenses do, and I won't develop presbyopia as these lenses don't focus using muscles around them. I have multifocal (trifocal) lenses, for near-, medium- and long distance viewing. Theoretically this means that I need more light to see as well as naturally focusing lenses, which worried me somewhat before, but in practice I do not really experience it - in fact I need less light to see well now than I did when I had glasses. As usual in life, the key to happiness is realistic expectations - as the surgeon told me 'there is no way we will be making your eyes work as well as they did when you were 20'. Two things I do have: for optimal near vision, I have to keep things closer to my eyes than I did before, 20-ish cm. So I had to adjust my screen viewing and reading posture. Also, I have what are called 'halos' around lights in the dark (this is a known and expected side effect, tons of YT videos that explain why they happen). Driving in the dark on highways with lots of artificial light sources has gotten more straining - meaning I need to focus more and feel more tired after driving say 2 hours in those circumstances than I did before the surgery. All other driving is the same and I don't notice the halos any more in other cases, like say when I'm just walking through the city in the dark. The driving at night price to pay is well worth it for me, may be different for others. Re: your mom - if she got monofocal lenses (which many people here do as they are the only ones covered by insurance if you're getting lens replacement for cataract), she would have gotten the choice between near- or far focus lenses, and would have decided together with the surgeon which ones are most appropriate for her life. I mean I obviously can't tell as I don't know her, but my dad is the same - he still needs reading glasses after his cataract surgery (IOL implants == cataract surgery).
wat10000 1y ago
“VIZZ works by gently shrinking the pupil of the eye” Does this mean you could replicate the effect with brighter lighting? I was hoping for something that would actually make the lens more flexible.
- mmastrac 1y ago
  This is probably why I need to have my phone at 100% brightness to read it.
- uranium 1y ago
  Yep. Bright light does the same thing. Also, in dim light, I'd expect this to make it pretty hard to see. My optometrist mentioned it to me, but neither of us could see the point.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    > but neither of us could see the point ... maybe you should be using it then? (Sorry... but not sorry.)
  - aaron695 1y ago
    [dead]
- krackers 1y ago
  >gently shrinking "Gentle" or not, is this actually safe for long-term use? Your pupil dilates in indoor light for a reason, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to fight that. You'd be better off just increasing ambient light levels to match sunlight.
  - wat10000 1y ago
    I can’t imagine it being unsafe (assuming the drug itself doesn’t do damage) since the restriction would let less light in. It’s not like forcibly dilating the pupil which could let in more light than the eye could handle. It could make things appear too dark while it’s happening though.
rf15 1y ago
Interesting. Now I'm worried we're moving from prescription lenses to subscription lenses.
- bruceallmighty 1y ago
  I'd say there's a reason we've moved to daily contact lenses over re-usable ones, conveniently in a ~monthly~ 28-day pack! There's obviously bound to be 'medical' and comfort reasons over disposable ones beyond the disposable society, but the cynic in me can't help but feel that research into longer-lasting more-comfortable reusable contacts would be taken through to market in preference to a more profitable cheaper-made daily product.
  - krupan 1y ago
    Daily contact lenses have several advantages. They: - don't accumulate gunk over days/weeks/months that can cause injury and/or infection - are cheap to replace if torn or lost (which happens with tiny transparent things) - are made from softer, thinner material (because it doesn't need to last) which is way more comfortable
  - wat10000 1y ago
    My monthly lenses work great, and the only way I can tell that they’re in is the fact that distant objects are clear.
  - geden 1y ago
    Dailies were a vast improvement in comfort and convenience for me over permanent lenses that required cleaning and storing overnight. Permanent lenses had also led to some blood vessel overgrowth due to lack of oxygenation. Using a new pair everyday does make quite a few tricky problems go away downside being slight extra cost and extra plastic pollution.
    - nerdsniper 1y ago
      > Permanent lenses had also led to some blood vessel overgrowth due to lack of oxygenation. FWIW, this no longer appears to be the case. New "extended-wear" contacts have excellent oxygen permeability, and my ophthalmologist hasn't noticed any overgrowth of capillaries/vessels over the past 15 years of me wearing them. You can also sleep in them now, and I find them more comfortable than dailies actually, due to their high permeability.
merek 1y ago
> The FDA approval comes based on trial data submitted by the pharmaceutical company, so it's worth noting that published peer-reviewed reports are yet to be published. Peer-reviewed publications often follow regulatory approvals, not precede them, which is common in the field of ophthalmology and dermatology. Does anyone know the reason that data is published after approval rather than before? Seems illogical at face value, but I'm obviously missing something.
- mentalfist 1y ago
  Short answer: FDA is totally toothless these days after decades of industry lobbying and Republican budget cuts. The industry has decided how they want things to work.
  - mentalfist 1y ago
    And you're thinking this ability to bypass scrutiny must lead to problems. Correct. When liabilities grow too big, the company will spin off the liabilities to a shell company without means to pay for damages caused. (this is called a "Texas two-step" bankruptcy)
    - hulitu 1y ago
      > And you're thinking this ability to bypass scrutiny must lead to problems. Of course not. Side effects ? Which side effects ? /s
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - refurb 1y ago
    You can educate yourself on the FDA process, including public access to all the FDA documentation, including meeting minutes and sponsorship slides. It’s all there on fda.gov But instead of doing that you’ve decided to just write this comment instead and post something that looks quite silly for those that have taken the first approach.
pharrington 1y ago
[flagged]
Drunk_Engineer 1y ago
So Retinox5 from Star Trek?
- Trixter 1y ago
  But I'm allergic to Retinox.
pazimzadeh 1y ago
So, if someone only has mild presbyopia do they take less? What happens if you take 'too much' for your level of impairment?
- bjackman 1y ago
  If it works by constricting the pupil I guess it's more like it's expanding the "depth of field". So you can't "over-correct" except in the sense that you will eventually run out of light. I don't really understand eyes or optics though, I'm just guessing based on my layman's understanding of focussing a camera, so take this with a pinch of salt!
  - croemer 1y ago
    You are correct.
modeless 1y ago
All it does is make the pupil smaller? Sure that will improve sharpness, but less light will reach the retina.
- FabHK 1y ago
  Indeed. You could make it brighter, which would shrink your pupils and make things easier to read. With this revolutionary medicine, you shrink your pupils, and then you need to make it brighter so you can still read. Is that it?
- Terr_ 1y ago
  I can see the marketing now: "Bottled Squintz®", when normal squinting is too much strain or annoyance.
- quitit 1y ago
  When in a pinch, one can make a tiny pinhole with their fingers for a similar effect. It comes with the same downside: reading in low light is difficult. For pinhole intraocular lenses these are implanted in just one eye for the same reason. I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time.
  - rectalogic 1y ago
    > I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time The dosage instructions say to use it in both eyes https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/218585s000lbl.pdf https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/21...
    - quitit 1y ago
      Ah that's interesting then. My guess would be that it doesn't close the iris as much then. However the linked does show 16% reporting dim vision, so there's some further work needed there (pupil size varies across the population, and there's the usual variation in dose efficacy.)
  - yencabulator 1y ago
FabHK 1y ago
Related question: When I looked into LASIK/SMILE recently, they said that after onset of presbyopia, they now routinely recommend "monovision", that is, regulate one of your eyes to 0 diopters, but the other to mild myopia of about -1 diopter. Then you look at far things with the former, and near things with the latter. Good old stereo vision is somewhat impacted, but not too badly apparently. Anyone got experience/comments on that? (Presumably one could replicate it with contact lenses, in particular.)
- altairprime 1y ago
  I was born with -4, +2 left and right eyes respectively (inherited), and as I get older towards reading glasses age, we have indeed found I get better corrective results from lenses when we tilt my right eye slightly better at distance and let my left eye pick up slightly more of reading. My depth cohesion barely functions to begin with as a result of one eye being a legally-blind blur past three feet until I was 18, but I can confirm that once you have depth perception, it isn’t going to fail you just for a slight shift in focal efforts.
- jsdalton 1y ago
  My father had his eyes fixed like this about a decade ago and purports to be happy with it. IIRC they did actually require that he wear contact lenses that replicated the effect for some amount of time (a month or so I believe) because there are people who are not happy with the arrangement. So they sort of force you to try before you buy.
- joshstrange 1y ago
  My parents tried this with contacts and hated it, then tried again a year or so later and adjusted quickly and liked it (no clue why the first attempt was unsuccessful). They still use contacts (not interested in LASIK, I’m not sure why or if they have considered it) that do this and seem happy with it.
- heikkilevanto 1y ago
  I was doing that for a few decades. Had to wear contacts for my astigmatism. Had my right dominant eye optimized for long distance, and the left with +1 or so for reading. I started to use cheap reading glasses on top when reading a lot. Had to give up the monovision trick and get multifocal glasses when my eyes aged more. But even with them, I kept a bit of monovision since I was so used to it.
amelius 1y ago
Note that it shrinks the pupils which is cosmetically not great.
- ginko 1y ago
  People might also think you're a junkie.
  - atombender 1y ago
    Drugs of the recreational kind cause pupil dilation. These drops cause contraction. Opioids can cause contraction, but probably not what you were thinking of?
    - ginko 1y ago
      Yes I meant opioids. Maybe it’s different in other places but over here a “junkie” specifically refers to a heroin or other opioid addict not a general drug user.
jmclnx 1y ago
I'll pass. Due to FDA cuts, I will wait years before I consider this product.
- 93po 1y ago
  What cuts? I looked online and I don't see a single year that it's ever gone down
  - jmclnx 1y ago
    Let me do a web search for you. Many smart people where fired by DOGE and many left on their own due to Trump. So,I no longer trust the FDA. https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-reportedly-fired-fda-employees-191543561.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-reportedly-fired-fda-employe... There are many articles about that.
    - 93po 1y ago
      i thought you meant budget cuts, of which there never has been as far as i can tell there was a 20% headcount reduction, down to a very meager 15,000 people. you dont believe the FDA can properly function with 15,000 employees?
      - jmclnx 1y ago
        I can see where you were thinking of $, sorry. Mainly it is the people who left and were fired. The brightest would jump ship instantly when DOGE started firing, and these scientists had lots of places to go. And the people fired probably had a lot of expertise. I have seen similar happen many times in computer science over the last 40+ years in the business. Once a company starts firing, the smartest people jumps ship. But yes, I cannot trust the FDA anymore because the people still there will be too scared to push real science. They may taint their results even without doing it on purpose due to that fear. The same is starting to happen in medial research, but seems that is getting more press. Trump/Kennedy just handed all the US future medical advancement directly to China, and I am sure more will come. Where do you think these bio researchers will go ? China will hire them and maybe even set up a shell corp. for them in the US so they do not have to relocate. Just the knowledge and patents will be sent to China. https://www.comicsands.com/rfk-jr-mrna-contracts https://www.comicsands.com/rfk-jr-mrna-contracts So Trump and friends is destroying the US right in front of everyone here.
atombender 1y ago
It's not clear if this will be a prescription product or over the counter. Anyone know?
gnatman 1y ago
It’s mentioned in the article, but there’s been a product on the market already for almost 5 years that does the same thing, with the same mechanism of action. That product, Vuity, has not been popular. The article makes it seem like the reason for Vuity’s lackluster performance is the incidence of side effects but I think it’s just not something people want to pay money for long term.
- leephillips 1y ago
  The article says that Vuity targeted the lens focusing muscles as well and that this product is the first that selectively acts on the pupil dilation muscles. That’s a big distinction.
leephillips 1y ago
The drops work by selectively acting on the muscles that control pupil size, constricting the eyes’ aperture. As anyone who knows photography is aware, this increases the depth of field (a larger range of distances from the eye will be approximately in focus). Of course this also reduces the brightness on the retina, so things will be darker, an effect confirmed by the linked FDA data. In that data it’s claimed that the perceived dimness is “temporary”; I guess because of accommodation that kicks in after a while. So this is like increasing your f-stop and your ISO.
owenversteeg 1y ago
This drug is for presbyopia (near things blurry) not myopia (far things blurry) but as these threads tend to discuss both, I will share something I read on HN many years ago that reversed my myopia: near-far focusing while outdoors. Just focus on something at >50 foot distance, focus on your finger right in front of your eye, near, far, near, far focusing just a few times. This completely reversed my early-stage myopia and my eyesight has been 20/20 for years since. I (and others) make this comment on HN from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38794682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38794682 - hopefully it helps others.
- jdance 1y ago
  Just quickly back and forth? For how long in total? Would love to try this
  - owenversteeg 1y ago
    Yep, just back and forth, make sure your eyes fully focus before switching. What I do is roughly 2 sec near, 2 sec far, etc, whole thing takes me maybe 30 seconds, but some people say to do it much more or wait as long as 10 sec before switching. Make sure to do it outside in the sunlight. Oh, and if you notice one eye focuses better than the other, then try it with just the bad eye. There's all sorts of discussion online and it's a pretty heated topic, flamewars, paid courses, forums, some people say it can only prevent it, some say it can reverse it, some say it does nothing, some will ban you for talking about it, etc. Then there is the even more controversial theory that you can recover from serious myopia with the "reduced lens" method. The popular opinion is that that's impossible, but there are a good handful of datapoints to the contrary. Personally, my myopia was never that bad, so I never got too deep into that stuff and just did the basic near-far-near exercises outside in the sun and that was enough to reverse the small decline in my vision.
    - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
      It makes a little sense, but I'm not sure it's good for your eyes. My eye doctor had me come in first thing in the morning, then again the next day at the end of the day, after my workday, and my vision had degraded about -0.25 to -0.5 over the course of the day, which is apparently pretty typical. If your prescription is just a little bit off, your eye muscles will work a little harder to hold things in focus, but over the course of the day, they get strained and tired, and at the end of the day they can't do it anymore. I can imagine if you really strength-trained those muscles, you could hold things in focus for longer, more comfortably, and inversely, I could imagine if you never really worked those muscles they'd atrophy somewhat. But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term. It would be like sitting on a wooden stool all day during your workday and saying "all you need to do is keep your core muscles strong by doing x/y/z workout a couple times a day," versus just getting a decent ergonomic chair. Nothing wrong with a workout or keeping your muscles strong, but in order to last a full lifetime, your muscles need lots of rest too, and I imagine getting proper glasses definitely helps.
dinkblam 1y ago
any info on availability in the EU?

129 points by geox 1y ago

mcv 1y ago

Just when I was finally coming to grips with needing bifocals.

How much will these cost? I'd love some immediately. I'm starting to need reading glasses and it is really disruptive to my whole life, I do lots of hobbies that need close up vision and never knew what life was like not having it. Edit: "During the investor call, Lenz executives outlined the cost of VIZZ. A monthly, 25-pack will cost $79. A 3-month pack from the e-pharmacy will cost $198 ($66 per month). Samples are anticipated in the United States as early as October 2025, with commercial product to be broadly available by mid-Q4 2025."

tguvot 1y ago
priced just below higher end daily contacts. tempting. but i need more than 10 hours usually
krupan 1y ago
Versus $15 reading glasses that will last years if you are just slightly careful with them. Hmmm
- zimpenfish 1y ago
  > Versus $15 reading glasses that will last years But the drops have the advantage of not messing with your distance vision like reading glasses do (unless you pay for varifocals, obvs.) - "[...] does not significantly affect the eye’s focusing muscles, so it doesn’t blur your distance vision [...]" For someone who has to switch between near and distance often, I can see the drops being useful, especially if your distance vision is fine and you don't need varifocals.
roel_v 1y ago
If you're mid-40s (which is the threshold ago where I am), and can afford the up front cost, consider IOL implants. Life changing (for me). (and re: costs, these drops are going to set you back $1000 a year as well, so after 7/8 years implants would be 'cheaper').
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  I’d really like those. My Mom got them and she said it didn’t help her near vision, which I didn’t understand. I guess she was a weird case because yeah I had just assumed that a new lens would fix the hardening of the lens with aging problem. Thanks for letting me know! How long should your new lenses last? Did they say? Will they eventually get hard like the human body’s lens or are you set for the rest of your life? It’s really cool you are part cyborg. Did you get a monofocal or multifocal lens?
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    Most artificial lenses, especially more than 5 years back, had a single focal point and did not adjust. You chose to either have near vision (mostly carless old people), far vision (and still use reading glasses), or blended vision (one eye far one near). The flexible lens stuff is still relatively new and there are reports of them sort of being like 80% focused 100% of the time, which can suck. Apparently lots of individual variability in results, where as the single-focus lenses are 60s technology and well figured out.
  - roel_v 1y ago
    I was told these lenses are for the rest of my life. I guess I'll know for sure in 40 years. They don't develop cataract like natural lenses do, and I won't develop presbyopia as these lenses don't focus using muscles around them. I have multifocal (trifocal) lenses, for near-, medium- and long distance viewing. Theoretically this means that I need more light to see as well as naturally focusing lenses, which worried me somewhat before, but in practice I do not really experience it - in fact I need less light to see well now than I did when I had glasses. As usual in life, the key to happiness is realistic expectations - as the surgeon told me 'there is no way we will be making your eyes work as well as they did when you were 20'. Two things I do have: for optimal near vision, I have to keep things closer to my eyes than I did before, 20-ish cm. So I had to adjust my screen viewing and reading posture. Also, I have what are called 'halos' around lights in the dark (this is a known and expected side effect, tons of YT videos that explain why they happen). Driving in the dark on highways with lots of artificial light sources has gotten more straining - meaning I need to focus more and feel more tired after driving say 2 hours in those circumstances than I did before the surgery. All other driving is the same and I don't notice the halos any more in other cases, like say when I'm just walking through the city in the dark. The driving at night price to pay is well worth it for me, may be different for others. Re: your mom - if she got monofocal lenses (which many people here do as they are the only ones covered by insurance if you're getting lens replacement for cataract), she would have gotten the choice between near- or far focus lenses, and would have decided together with the surgeon which ones are most appropriate for her life. I mean I obviously can't tell as I don't know her, but my dad is the same - he still needs reading glasses after his cataract surgery (IOL implants == cataract surgery).

wat10000 1y ago

“VIZZ works by gently shrinking the pupil of the eye” Does this mean you could replicate the effect with brighter lighting? I was hoping for something that would actually make the lens more flexible.

mmastrac 1y ago
This is probably why I need to have my phone at 100% brightness to read it.
uranium 1y ago
Yep. Bright light does the same thing. Also, in dim light, I'd expect this to make it pretty hard to see. My optometrist mentioned it to me, but neither of us could see the point.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  > but neither of us could see the point ... maybe you should be using it then? (Sorry... but not sorry.)
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
krackers 1y ago
>gently shrinking "Gentle" or not, is this actually safe for long-term use? Your pupil dilates in indoor light for a reason, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to fight that. You'd be better off just increasing ambient light levels to match sunlight.
- wat10000 1y ago
  I can’t imagine it being unsafe (assuming the drug itself doesn’t do damage) since the restriction would let less light in. It’s not like forcibly dilating the pupil which could let in more light than the eye could handle. It could make things appear too dark while it’s happening though.

rf15 1y ago

Interesting. Now I'm worried we're moving from prescription lenses to subscription lenses.

bruceallmighty 1y ago
I'd say there's a reason we've moved to daily contact lenses over re-usable ones, conveniently in a ~monthly~ 28-day pack! There's obviously bound to be 'medical' and comfort reasons over disposable ones beyond the disposable society, but the cynic in me can't help but feel that research into longer-lasting more-comfortable reusable contacts would be taken through to market in preference to a more profitable cheaper-made daily product.
- krupan 1y ago
  Daily contact lenses have several advantages. They: - don't accumulate gunk over days/weeks/months that can cause injury and/or infection - are cheap to replace if torn or lost (which happens with tiny transparent things) - are made from softer, thinner material (because it doesn't need to last) which is way more comfortable
- wat10000 1y ago
  My monthly lenses work great, and the only way I can tell that they’re in is the fact that distant objects are clear.
- geden 1y ago
  Dailies were a vast improvement in comfort and convenience for me over permanent lenses that required cleaning and storing overnight. Permanent lenses had also led to some blood vessel overgrowth due to lack of oxygenation. Using a new pair everyday does make quite a few tricky problems go away downside being slight extra cost and extra plastic pollution.
  - nerdsniper 1y ago
    > Permanent lenses had also led to some blood vessel overgrowth due to lack of oxygenation. FWIW, this no longer appears to be the case. New "extended-wear" contacts have excellent oxygen permeability, and my ophthalmologist hasn't noticed any overgrowth of capillaries/vessels over the past 15 years of me wearing them. You can also sleep in them now, and I find them more comfortable than dailies actually, due to their high permeability.

merek 1y ago

> The FDA approval comes based on trial data submitted by the pharmaceutical company, so it's worth noting that published peer-reviewed reports are yet to be published. Peer-reviewed publications often follow regulatory approvals, not precede them, which is common in the field of ophthalmology and dermatology. Does anyone know the reason that data is published after approval rather than before? Seems illogical at face value, but I'm obviously missing something.

mentalfist 1y ago
Short answer: FDA is totally toothless these days after decades of industry lobbying and Republican budget cuts. The industry has decided how they want things to work.
- mentalfist 1y ago
  And you're thinking this ability to bypass scrutiny must lead to problems. Correct. When liabilities grow too big, the company will spin off the liabilities to a shell company without means to pay for damages caused. (this is called a "Texas two-step" bankruptcy)
  - hulitu 1y ago
    > And you're thinking this ability to bypass scrutiny must lead to problems. Of course not. Side effects ? Which side effects ? /s
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- refurb 1y ago
  You can educate yourself on the FDA process, including public access to all the FDA documentation, including meeting minutes and sponsorship slides. It’s all there on fda.gov But instead of doing that you’ve decided to just write this comment instead and post something that looks quite silly for those that have taken the first approach.

pharrington 1y ago

[flagged]

Drunk_Engineer 1y ago

So Retinox5 from Star Trek?

Trixter 1y ago
But I'm allergic to Retinox.

pazimzadeh 1y ago

So, if someone only has mild presbyopia do they take less? What happens if you take 'too much' for your level of impairment?

bjackman 1y ago
If it works by constricting the pupil I guess it's more like it's expanding the "depth of field". So you can't "over-correct" except in the sense that you will eventually run out of light. I don't really understand eyes or optics though, I'm just guessing based on my layman's understanding of focussing a camera, so take this with a pinch of salt!
- croemer 1y ago
  You are correct.

modeless 1y ago

All it does is make the pupil smaller? Sure that will improve sharpness, but less light will reach the retina.

FabHK 1y ago
Indeed. You could make it brighter, which would shrink your pupils and make things easier to read. With this revolutionary medicine, you shrink your pupils, and then you need to make it brighter so you can still read. Is that it?
Terr_ 1y ago
I can see the marketing now: "Bottled Squintz®", when normal squinting is too much strain or annoyance.
quitit 1y ago
When in a pinch, one can make a tiny pinhole with their fingers for a similar effect. It comes with the same downside: reading in low light is difficult. For pinhole intraocular lenses these are implanted in just one eye for the same reason. I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time.
- rectalogic 1y ago
  > I imagine this product would be used in just one eye at a time The dosage instructions say to use it in both eyes https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/218585s000lbl.pdf https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2025/21...
  - quitit 1y ago
    Ah that's interesting then. My guess would be that it doesn't close the iris as much then. However the linked does show 16% reporting dim vision, so there's some further work needed there (pupil size varies across the population, and there's the usual variation in dose efficacy.)
- yencabulator 1y ago

FabHK 1y ago

Related question: When I looked into LASIK/SMILE recently, they said that after onset of presbyopia, they now routinely recommend "monovision", that is, regulate one of your eyes to 0 diopters, but the other to mild myopia of about -1 diopter. Then you look at far things with the former, and near things with the latter. Good old stereo vision is somewhat impacted, but not too badly apparently. Anyone got experience/comments on that? (Presumably one could replicate it with contact lenses, in particular.)

altairprime 1y ago
I was born with -4, +2 left and right eyes respectively (inherited), and as I get older towards reading glasses age, we have indeed found I get better corrective results from lenses when we tilt my right eye slightly better at distance and let my left eye pick up slightly more of reading. My depth cohesion barely functions to begin with as a result of one eye being a legally-blind blur past three feet until I was 18, but I can confirm that once you have depth perception, it isn’t going to fail you just for a slight shift in focal efforts.
jsdalton 1y ago
My father had his eyes fixed like this about a decade ago and purports to be happy with it. IIRC they did actually require that he wear contact lenses that replicated the effect for some amount of time (a month or so I believe) because there are people who are not happy with the arrangement. So they sort of force you to try before you buy.
joshstrange 1y ago
My parents tried this with contacts and hated it, then tried again a year or so later and adjusted quickly and liked it (no clue why the first attempt was unsuccessful). They still use contacts (not interested in LASIK, I’m not sure why or if they have considered it) that do this and seem happy with it.
heikkilevanto 1y ago
I was doing that for a few decades. Had to wear contacts for my astigmatism. Had my right dominant eye optimized for long distance, and the left with +1 or so for reading. I started to use cheap reading glasses on top when reading a lot. Had to give up the monovision trick and get multifocal glasses when my eyes aged more. But even with them, I kept a bit of monovision since I was so used to it.

amelius 1y ago

Note that it shrinks the pupils which is cosmetically not great.

ginko 1y ago
People might also think you're a junkie.
- atombender 1y ago
  Drugs of the recreational kind cause pupil dilation. These drops cause contraction. Opioids can cause contraction, but probably not what you were thinking of?
  - ginko 1y ago
    Yes I meant opioids. Maybe it’s different in other places but over here a “junkie” specifically refers to a heroin or other opioid addict not a general drug user.

jmclnx 1y ago

I'll pass. Due to FDA cuts, I will wait years before I consider this product.

93po 1y ago
What cuts? I looked online and I don't see a single year that it's ever gone down
- jmclnx 1y ago
  Let me do a web search for you. Many smart people where fired by DOGE and many left on their own due to Trump. So,I no longer trust the FDA. https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-reportedly-fired-fda-employees-191543561.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-reportedly-fired-fda-employe... There are many articles about that.
  - 93po 1y ago
    i thought you meant budget cuts, of which there never has been as far as i can tell there was a 20% headcount reduction, down to a very meager 15,000 people. you dont believe the FDA can properly function with 15,000 employees?
    - jmclnx 1y ago
      I can see where you were thinking of $, sorry. Mainly it is the people who left and were fired. The brightest would jump ship instantly when DOGE started firing, and these scientists had lots of places to go. And the people fired probably had a lot of expertise. I have seen similar happen many times in computer science over the last 40+ years in the business. Once a company starts firing, the smartest people jumps ship. But yes, I cannot trust the FDA anymore because the people still there will be too scared to push real science. They may taint their results even without doing it on purpose due to that fear. The same is starting to happen in medial research, but seems that is getting more press. Trump/Kennedy just handed all the US future medical advancement directly to China, and I am sure more will come. Where do you think these bio researchers will go ? China will hire them and maybe even set up a shell corp. for them in the US so they do not have to relocate. Just the knowledge and patents will be sent to China. https://www.comicsands.com/rfk-jr-mrna-contracts https://www.comicsands.com/rfk-jr-mrna-contracts So Trump and friends is destroying the US right in front of everyone here.

atombender 1y ago

It's not clear if this will be a prescription product or over the counter. Anyone know?

gnatman 1y ago

It’s mentioned in the article, but there’s been a product on the market already for almost 5 years that does the same thing, with the same mechanism of action. That product, Vuity, has not been popular. The article makes it seem like the reason for Vuity’s lackluster performance is the incidence of side effects but I think it’s just not something people want to pay money for long term.

leephillips 1y ago
The article says that Vuity targeted the lens focusing muscles as well and that this product is the first that selectively acts on the pupil dilation muscles. That’s a big distinction.

leephillips 1y ago

The drops work by selectively acting on the muscles that control pupil size, constricting the eyes’ aperture. As anyone who knows photography is aware, this increases the depth of field (a larger range of distances from the eye will be approximately in focus). Of course this also reduces the brightness on the retina, so things will be darker, an effect confirmed by the linked FDA data. In that data it’s claimed that the perceived dimness is “temporary”; I guess because of accommodation that kicks in after a while. So this is like increasing your f-stop and your ISO.

owenversteeg 1y ago

This drug is for presbyopia (near things blurry) not myopia (far things blurry) but as these threads tend to discuss both, I will share something I read on HN many years ago that reversed my myopia: near-far focusing while outdoors. Just focus on something at >50 foot distance, focus on your finger right in front of your eye, near, far, near, far focusing just a few times. This completely reversed my early-stage myopia and my eyesight has been 20/20 for years since. I (and others) make this comment on HN from time to time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38794682 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38794682 - hopefully it helps others.

jdance 1y ago
Just quickly back and forth? For how long in total? Would love to try this
- owenversteeg 1y ago
  Yep, just back and forth, make sure your eyes fully focus before switching. What I do is roughly 2 sec near, 2 sec far, etc, whole thing takes me maybe 30 seconds, but some people say to do it much more or wait as long as 10 sec before switching. Make sure to do it outside in the sunlight. Oh, and if you notice one eye focuses better than the other, then try it with just the bad eye. There's all sorts of discussion online and it's a pretty heated topic, flamewars, paid courses, forums, some people say it can only prevent it, some say it can reverse it, some say it does nothing, some will ban you for talking about it, etc. Then there is the even more controversial theory that you can recover from serious myopia with the "reduced lens" method. The popular opinion is that that's impossible, but there are a good handful of datapoints to the contrary. Personally, my myopia was never that bad, so I never got too deep into that stuff and just did the basic near-far-near exercises outside in the sun and that was enough to reverse the small decline in my vision.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y ago
    It makes a little sense, but I'm not sure it's good for your eyes. My eye doctor had me come in first thing in the morning, then again the next day at the end of the day, after my workday, and my vision had degraded about -0.25 to -0.5 over the course of the day, which is apparently pretty typical. If your prescription is just a little bit off, your eye muscles will work a little harder to hold things in focus, but over the course of the day, they get strained and tired, and at the end of the day they can't do it anymore. I can imagine if you really strength-trained those muscles, you could hold things in focus for longer, more comfortably, and inversely, I could imagine if you never really worked those muscles they'd atrophy somewhat. But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term. It would be like sitting on a wooden stool all day during your workday and saying "all you need to do is keep your core muscles strong by doing x/y/z workout a couple times a day," versus just getting a decent ergonomic chair. Nothing wrong with a workout or keeping your muscles strong, but in order to last a full lifetime, your muscles need lots of rest too, and I imagine getting proper glasses definitely helps.

dinkblam 1y ago

any info on availability in the EU?