NUTRITION AND EYE HEALTH
We need to talk about nutrition Steph Moore explores how you can empower your patients when it comes to nutrition for eye health Prevention is always better than cure
A proactive approach to nutrition and eye health can make a big difference, both to patient care and for your business. Traditionally, conversations around diet and lifestyle have not been a primary role for an eyecare professional. They can also be deemed difficult to start, time-consuming or maybe even non-essential. This article shares approaches that can help you to refine your approach to eye health conversations, and therefore give your patients the best advice. Two million people in the UK are already living with poor vision. By 2050, the number of people living with cataracts and glaucoma will double, while macular degeneration will almost triple (Pezullo et al, 2018). With this in mind, and the ever-increasing strain on the NHS, conversations about how to maintain vision and care for ageing eyes are both clinically and economically important.
This can also be a key consideration for a successful practice, from both a financial perspective and for building trusted, longterm relationships with your patients.
IMPROVING KNOWLEDGE AND UPTAKE When a group of 126 ECPs (Nutritional Advice in Optometry Survey, 2019) were asked if they took a nutritional supplement for themselves, 52 per cent replied yes. However, when the question was asked about recommending a supplement for eye health to their patients, only 22 per cent replied that they would recommend such a supplement to most patients. So, what more can be done to give patients the best possible advice when it comes to protecting their eyesight in the long term? We talk to Jean Oldbury, optometrist at Oldbury and Cruickshank in Macclesfield, and Leanda Beynon, a dispensing optician working at Nixon and Shaw Opticians in Wiltshire. Both take a very proactive approach to offering lifestyle and nutrition advice to their patients. Jean started to offer lifestyle and nutrition advice because she felt it was “a duty of care as an optometrist to give advice about a healthy lifestyle, and include advice on nutrition, especially if the optometrist is aware of any risk factors, including family history of age-related macular degeneration [AMD] or smoking.” Leanda takes a holistic approach to her patients’ eye health. She says: “I feel passionately that it should be part of the dispensing process for dispensing opticians; we can offer so much more than spectacle sales. Talking to the patient about their eye health can be included in the hand-over, or when the dispensing optician is discussing the needs of the patient.”
Take a tailored approach with each patient
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Vision Now JUNE 2020
Leanda also finds that moving the conversation onto risk factors can be a good
pathway into discussion about what patients can do to support their own eye health. Research has shown that giving patients a number that is a measure of their health status can greatly improve the likelihood of actually making changes to diet and lifestyle – and being compliant with those changes (Margolis et al, 2013 and Chen et al, 2019). “Optical coherence tomography [OCT] allows us to explore patients’ eye health in more depth, and to show any changes happening over time to structures such as the macula,” Leanda explains. “It also presents us with the opportunity to discuss signs of conditions such as AMD, but also to advise patients on how to maintain healthy vision when no symptoms are present.” Jean finds that “while having an OCT scan, the patient is more tuned in to what the OCT results may tell us. So whilst having a scan can be a ‘conversation’ piece, again, it’s also another way to keep healthy and live longer. Plus, it’s also something to drop in when talking about the advantages of having OCT and its results.” Leanda keeps it simple and takes the time to demonstrate to patients the risks without the use of OCT. She explains: “I use the Thea nutritional questionnaire to demonstrate to the patient their risk and follow this with a conversation with knowledge of nutrition and supplements.” She adds: “Having confidence in the product you are recommending is invaluable.” A common objection to recommending a nutritional supplement is the perception that the evidence is weak for their use. However, the evidence is actually strong around key nutrients that have been shown to support eye health, and therefore any product recommendation should include carotenoids (lutein and zeaxanthin), zinc,
