Myopia: The drugs do work

The use of drugs to manage myopia presents a number of challenges. These include the potential impacts of long-term drug metabolism and excretion, concerns about adverse effects, issues related to compliance and accurate dosing, visual compromise during therapy, patient discomfort, and the possibility of rebound effects upon therapy cessation. However, the use of topical agents, in particular the anti-muscarinic drug atropine, has been found to be an effective way of limiting myopic progression and, in recent years, changes to the concentration, formulation, mode of administration, treatment protocol and the introduction of new drug therapies all indicate that a pharmaceutical approach is likely to be an important part of the practitioner’s approach to myopia management in practice.