As Dry Eye Awareness Month kicks off, Bausch + Lomb is rolling out a new campaign to improve education about the condition.
The latest awareness push, dubbed “Eyes Tell the Story: The Impact of Dry Eye,” builds on the “Know Your Dry Eye” campaign that the company launched last July. Not only are the new materials hosted on the Know Your Dry Eye website, but this year’s campaign is once again rolling out alongside the results of Bausch + Lomb’s now-annual “State of Dry Eye” survey.
The Eyes Tell the Story initiative is focused on sharing the stories of real people living with dry eye disease. The campaign was shot by photographer Kayte Demont, who speaks about her own experiences with the condition alongside those of content creators Alvin Wayne and Brianne Manz.
Elsewhere within the Eyes Tell the Story section of the Know Your Dry Eye site, visitors can submit their stories of living with dry eye, for a chance to be featured in next year’s Dry Eye Awareness Month campaign.
While last year’s inaugural State of Dry Eye survey included people with and without regular dry eye symptoms and formal diagnoses to highlight a broader lack of understanding around the disease and its risks and symptoms, this year’s survey homed in on the former group, which Bausch + Lomb terms “sufferers.” It recruited more than 700 adults who were actively treating their dry eye with either a prescription or over-the-counter product.
Even focusing on people with firsthand experience with dry eye, the new survey showed that misconceptions about the condition still abound. More than 60% said they either mistakenly assume that or aren’t sure if dry eye can resolve itself after some treatment, and more than 40% didn’t know that their chronic dry eye is not a temporary condition and that it can require long-term treatment.
Overall, close to 80% of dry eye sufferers said they wish they had more resources and education about the condition.
“Approximately 150 million U.S. adults experience occasional or frequent symptoms of dry eye, with around 38 million living with chronic dry eye, also known as dry eye disease,” Yehia Hashad, M.D., executive VP of R&D and chief medical officer at Bausch + Lomb, said in this week’s campaign launch announcement. “By spotlighting these personal stories, we hope to help more people recognize their dry eye symptoms sooner so they will seek and find relief.”
In a tie to Bausch + Lomb’s commercial work, the survey also dug into dry eye patients’ experiences with various treatments, with at least half saying they’re looking for a product to treat dryness and more than 70% hoping for consistent relief over time. The results went on to highlight the common delay between when bothersome symptoms arrive and when a patient finally visits a doctor, noting that close to 90% of those on prescription treatments said they wished they’d started treatment sooner.
Bausch + Lomb offers several OTC and prescription treatments for dry eye, the latter of which includes Miebo and Xiidra. Links on the campaign site guide visitors to each category’s page on the company’s official website.