Dr. John Sheppard of VEC Recommends HydroEye for All Dry Eye Patients

Online, January 11, 2014 (Newswire.com) - Dr. John Sheppard of Virginia Eye Consultants has recommended HydroEye for all dry eye patients. HydroEye is a patented nutritional formulation that works from the inside out to provide continuous dry eye relief.

"Achieving statistical significance in a dry eye study is a remarkable accomplishment, especially given the extreme difficulty that many highly regarded pharmaceutical companies have had in bringing a prescription dry eye product to market," said John D. Sheppard, M.D., M.M.Sc., president, Virginia Eye Consultants. "This was a prospective, randomized, multicenter, placebo-controlled trial as would be any U.S. Food & Drug Administration registration clinical study."

Dry eye is estimated to affect 30 million Americans, but the actual number of dry eye sufferers is thought to be much higher because cases of dry eye tend to be dramatically underreported. In the U.S. alone, the economic burden of dry eye totals $3.84 billion in direct annual health care costs. When including the indirect costs of lost productivity, the societal burden of dry eye rises to $55.4 billion annually in the U.S.

A wide variety of dry eye treatments are available; however, many have disadvantages or side effects. Oral prescription dry eye therapies such as secretagogues have a host of systemic side effects, such as intestinal cramping. Oral antibiotics such as doxycycline can cause gastrointestinal upset, sunburn sensitivity and tooth discoloration in younger patients. Topical therapies often present compliance, toxicity and cost issues, while some eye drops may sting, burn or cause allergic reactions.

"Given these parameters, HydroEye is among the safest, best tolerated, efficacious, and most cost-effective of all dry eye therapies," said Dr. Sheppard. "I recommend HydroEye to all of my dry eye patients."