The presbyopic contact lens market
Erin Rueff, OD, PhD, of the Southern California College of Optometry, spoke with Optometry 360 about her recent presentation at the American Academy of Optometry 2025 Annual Meeting. The talk focused on tips and best practices for fitting patients with presbyopia with the most optimal contact lens.
Erin Rueff, OD, PhD:
Hi, I am Erin Rueff. I am chief of the cornea contact lens service at the Southern California College of Optometry. I teach there and see patients and do all things contact lens and ocular surface disease.
I’ve had a couple of talks at the Academy this year. The first one is about presbyopic contact lens wearers. What we talked about in that lecture is sort of an overview of what the presbyopic contact lens market looks like right now. The sort of headline there is that we’re improving on our prescribing for presbyopic contact lens wearers, but there’s still a lot of room for even more improvement, meaning that there are probably about 40% to 60% of presbyopes wearing contacts that aren’t wearing a modality that addresses their near vision. In this talk, we talked about why that might be, and most of those reasons are probably misconceptions or preconceptions that we have as providers because the data showing us that these contact lens wearers are really interested in things like multifocals.
We talked about mono-vision versus multifocal options, and specifically talked about how mono vision is sort of an adaptation to a lack of technology or parameter availabilities that we had in the past. Patients prefer a multifocal option when they are offered one or when one exists. As fitters, we need to be really proactive about fitting multifocal options whenever we can. In 2025, there’s been an explosion of parameter availabilities that now we can fit pretty much any refractive error, whether they have astigmatism or not, high minus, high plus that comes into our practice. Then, we also talked about some tips and best practices for fitting multifocals, how to have success with them, and how to talk to your patients about what to expect during that adaptation process. That’s about it for the presbyopia talk.
