Atropine for the Treatment of Childhood Myopia

Myopia managment and myopia control is a beinng used more by Winnipeg optometrists. Today I am looking at an important study for you to be aware of if you are using atropine for myopia control. It’s the ATOM study.

This study is a called Atropine for the Treatment of Childhood Myopia and sometimes it is referred to as the ATOM or ATOM 1 Study. It was published in the journal Ophthalmology in 2006.

This is a placebo controlled, double masked randomized study that looked at 400 asian Children between the ages of 6-12years old. Those in the treatment group used 1.0% Atropine, one drop in one eye every evening for 2 years. It looked the change in myopia and the change in the length of the eye over the 2 years.

Take at look at this graph: now remember they were only treating one eye in the treated kids and compared that also to kids using a placebo.

This shows that the myopia in the treated eye progresses by only about -0.25 while the untreated eyes progressed by about -1.25 D. This is about a 77% reduction in the progression of myopia.

Likewise in this graph, the axial length showed that the treated eyes did not increase in axial length but the untreated eyes increased in lenth by 0.38mm which was a significant difference

So here is what you should take away from the ATOM study:

Studies on Atropine use in myopia control have been done before this study, but this study is the first one that used a well designed controlled randomized study design.
1%Atropine does cause pupil dilation and it freezes the ability to accommodate or autofocus….so the use of 1% Atropine may require tinted lenses to reduce glare and bifocal lenses to allow focusing at close
The ATOM 1 study demonstrates strong evidence that atropine is effective in slowing the progression of myopia in children.

So if you wear eye glassess due to myopia in Winnipeg, you may benefit from myopia control with Atropine eyedrops. Call your Winnipeg eye doctor at Waverley Eye Care to book your child’s an eye exam.