Are Contact Lenses Damaging Your Eyes?

Apparently putting contacts in your eye is “not a neutral act” according to microbiologist Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello. In fact, contacts might just change more than your vision. Dominguez-Bello and other researchers from NYU’s Langone Medical center found significant differences in the ecosystems of the eyes of people who wear contact lenses and those who don’t.

In their study, they took hundreds of swabs of people’s eye conjunctiva, which lines the eyelids and covers the white part of your eyes, and swabs of the skin directly under the eye. They found thousands of different strains in the different parts of the eye. But in those people who wore contacts, they had more bacterial diversity in the skin beneath their eye and a higher amount of different kinds of bacteria on the surface of the eye itself. They had three times the usual proportion of certain bacteria like Methylobacterium, Lactobacillus, Acinetobacter, and Pseudomonas bacteria in the eyes. Basically, the bacteria on the surface of their eyes looked more like the types of bacteria found on the skin beneath their eye, when compared to those who don’t wear contacts at all.

But the researchers still wonder if this altered bacterial composition is because contact wearers keep touching their eyes with their dirty little fingers or if it’s the lens itself that is changing the immune system of the eye. So more research is needed. However, the researchers think this could be part of the reason contact wearers get more frequent eye infections.

Since the 1970s when soft contact lenses came on the scene, corneal ulcers have been on the rise. Corneal ulcers leave a nasty open sore on the cornea. They’re caused by bacterial, fungal or viral infections, mostly Pseudomonas. Since that type of bacteria is found on the skin, eyelid and hand hygiene might be to blame. Specifically, another study published in Optometry and Vision Science identified three specific behaviors that might lead to nasty infections.

And they’re pretty straight foward like not washing hands with soap and water before handling contacts, not letting the case air-dry, surprisingly and i’m a little skeptical on this point, using a contact case and a solution from different manufacturers. I mean some bottles of solution come with cases, but I just assumed they were being nice, and all that “please use our solution for the best results or whatever” was just marketing BS.

But maybe not? Or if you’re too lazy to do any of that, you could try contacts coated with anti-microbial stuff. One study also published in the journal Optometry and Vision Science tested a type of contact coated with melamine. This peptide fights microbes by inhibiting their growth. In this study, human volunteers wore these coated contacts for a day with no major side-effects and they were just as comfortable as regular lenses. So that could be handy to have.

And I know I know, it sounds scary that YOU HAVE BACTERIA IN YOUR EYE. But bacteria is everywhere in and on us, we’re like a walking ecosystem. And not all of it is bad, our microbiome might be beneficial for health. But some bacteria do cause nasty infections if they get out of hand, so if you’re worried basically, keep your contacts clean?

It shouldn’t take science for you to get that. Just get a nice routine down of washing your hands before you handle your contacts and air-drying the cases every now and then. But if shaving is part of your routine, maybe you should wait to take your contacts out AFTER you’re done with that.

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