UK Keratoconus Self-Help and Support Association

Hi,

After my first post today I spoke directly to Ultravision customer services apparantely they are launching a very new contact lens called Kerasoft 3, which is made out of Silicone Hydrogel.

At the moment they are only just getting the fitting sets out to the teaching hospitals with the optometrists getting fitting sets in the next two weeks. I have been told that they are an 'exciting development' for kerataconics.

As a result of this new information I cancelled my appointment for tomorrow and am going to have booked to have a trial set of Kerasoft 3 fitted the beginning of December (subject to being suitable of course).

I will let you know how I get on with them.

My nephew is also going to ask his hospital to refer him to an optometrist who does these lenses so I will tell you how he gets on aswell as his KC is far worse than mine and he is struggling enormously with RGP.

Hi Elizabeth,

I was just going to answer your previous post when I saw this one. I work for UltraVision and helped develop the new KeraSoft lens. It is indeed in a position of being trialled at the moment and we feel it is more reliable in the fitting than the previous version and also that the new material may help in providing longer wear times.

If you want to talk to me about it, please feel free to email me on the address given in my signature.

Lynn,
Will kerasoft 3 just more tolerable or is the material more rigid too? The reason I ask is that I wear kerasoft and there great but I still get a bit of double vision and glare effect. Not enough to worry about but I just wondered....

Matthew

Sorry for the delay but I was away at a conference for 2 days and I have been madly catching up today.

OK.... let me explain more clearly. The material is Silicone Hydrogel 74% water content, lathe cuttable but not requiring any treatment to make the surface wettable. The silicone helps to let oxygen through but if you have too much of it, it repels water like crazy and most of the SiH lenses on the market have to be specially treated to make it wet properly.

So this new material has actually less silicone in it than most other silicone hydrogels. It is therefore is slightly less stiff as well. It does remain very wet and comfortable in the eye. I have been trialling lenses made from the material myself - tonight I was trying them out in a room with the central heating turned right up and doors tight shut. Lenses were excellent - though I nearly passed out with heat stroke hehe! I am almost as bad as Gareth in trying things out to satisfy my curiosity!

The vision problems are related to the design I think. We are getting much better vision results with the new KeraSoft for the following reasons. The old KeraSoft design uses trial lenses that are spherical on the back surface. But if you needed astigmatism correcting, technology at the time meant that it had to be put on the back surface in the final lens. So you were not been trialled with what you eventually got, hence sometimes a vision mismatch. Now, advances in technology mean that we can put the astigmatism correction on the front of the lens... hence the lens you are trialled with and the lens you get finally both have the same back surface and the final fit is much more stable.

It may just be that even if you had KersSoft3 lenses you may STILL get that bit of blur, despite everything. This is because keratoconics have a lot of high aberrations due to the distortion of their cornea. This can even cause blurring with RGP's. You would need an individually made lens designed to correct the exact aberrations you had to eliminate that final bit of glare and blur. Sounds difficult but actually, UltraVision is working on that as well and Gareth has already tried one. This is really cutting edge stuff but its actually very possible due to developments in lathe technology. It has to be tried on a lot of strange shaped corneas before it can be launched though.

Hope all this helps!!

Lynn

Being the powd owner of two pairs of the K3's they are on a par with RGP's for vision in my case.

Extremely comfortable and the lens wear time is currently at 11 hours. This is because we found that rather than 48 hours for my cornea to settle after wearing an RGP, it appears takes nearer 7 days. Therefore by 10 hours we think I am getting eye strain as the days progress.

Being post graft oxygen transfer is important which was a problem for me with the K2, no such problem with K3 and have worn these all day in an airconditioned office at 24 degress centigrade and humidity of 35%. After a week of this my eyes were amazingly comfortable.

Soon to get glasses which give useable vision in one eye so that we can tweak the current lens for cornea that is in it's 'natuarl KC state'.

The otehr lens Lynn mentions gives 6/5 in my left eye, we ran out of time to really try for the right eye so hen I go back to tweak the K3 lenses, hopefully we can have another go at the other lens.

It is a very interesting time for KC contact lens development.

Hi Gareth...

nice to see you back. Hope the car is a bit healthier now?