From Dusk to Dawn: Contact Lenses in the Night Tear Proteome

Jack Huang

I saw the letter E, big, black and bold. Now read me line six, the nurse said, pointing to a row of blurry rectangles. I squinted and took my best educated guess, but the nurse frowned, scribbling a note on her clipboard. The second week of first grade, I had failed my first test. The school vision test was the one (and usually only) exam I failed each year. It became somewhat of a routine, seeing the school nurse, squinting at the fuzzy shapes on the eye chart, finding myself in the optometrist’s office a week later. The doctor would check my eyes, shake his head, and write out a prescription for new glasses . . . Two years ago, I stumbled upon something that would change my life. At a gathering of family friends, my mother noticed that one of her friend’s daughters, who used to wear glasses, was now free of spectacles. The casual comment of ‘How do your contacts feel?’ revealed that the girl was not, in fact, wearing any contacts. Not at the time, anyway, she had been fitted with overnight orthokeratology (ortho-k) contact lenses, a special type of rigid contact lens that is worn at night. During sleep these lenses reshape the cornea, and during the day the molded cornea effectively acts like a natural contact lens, eliminating the need for glasses or contacts during the day . . . I did some more research online and found that not all contact lenses are created equal when it comes to protein deposition. Most studies showed that soft lenses (such as those worn during the day) tend to attract more protein than hard lenses (such as those used in ortho-k). This seemed to answer the question of why I could wear these ortho-k lenses, but not my previous soft contacts, at night. As I was about to leave the page, however, I came across another article, this one saying that tears in the eye at night actually have a very different protein composition from those of the day. I looked back at the previous articles comparing hard and soft contacts, and found that all of them were indeed done during the day, none of them at night. There was a void here, one that this project begins to fill.