Preventative Eye Care: Getting Patients To Change Behaviours

This lecture will be presented by Prof Shelby Temple. Optometrists have a unique opportunity to help people improve overall health and maintain healthy sight. This talk explores the science behind lifestyle behaviours and protective products that can help protect sight through life, and how eye care professionals can help motivate their patients to make changes and use these products. The focus will be on risk factors for one the leading causes of sight loss, age-related macular degeneration.

1 Interactive CPD point has been accredited by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists

Target Professional Groups - Optometrist, Dispensing Optician / 1 Interactive CPD Point / CPD reference C-102938

Clinical Practice - Attendees will be able to understand how various lifestyle choices and protective products can help decrease the long-term cumulative retinal damage. For example, the cumulative effect of high energy visible light and free radicals leading to accumulation of lipofuscin and drusen, which are risk factors for age-related macular degeneration. (s.5)

Attendees will be able to understand the adverse effects of lighting and glare on contrast sensitivity and the way that low macular pigments can impair a patient’s vision by lowering their contrast sensitivity and ability to deal with glare. (s.7)

Communication - Attendees will be able to explain to patients about the common risk factors associated with common ocular conditions and also communicate lifestyle changes and protective products. (s.1)

Prof Shelby Temple is a visual neuroscientist who has spent the past 25 years studying how light interacts with the eye, during which time he has published over 45 peer-reviewed publications on varied topics from corneal surface microstructures to variation in colour vision across the retina to how macular pigments enable us to perceive polarization of light. His research into polarization sensitivity at the University of Bristol, led to the invention of a new ophthalmic instrument (MP-eye) that detects a risk factor for age-related macular degeneration (AMD)