It’s that time of year, when Business Link Magazine invites the region’s business leaders to offer up their predictions for the year ahead.
It has become something of a tradition, given that we’ve been doing this now for over 30 years.
Here we speak to Lesley Cree, owner of Lesley Cree Opticians, who offers her predictions on eye health and opthalmic industry trends.
It is clear that consumers are very concerned about the use of plastics in the products they use and spectacle frame manufacturers are responding by launching new brands such as Sea2See and Zeal in order to meet this demand. I think we will continue to see more developments in this area with optical frames and sunglasses being made from sustainable and recycled materials such as the waste plastics collected from our oceans.
By 2050, the prevalence of myopia (short-sightedness) globally is predicted to be 50% of the world’s population and, whilst this very common eye condition is usually corrected with glasses or contact lenses, untreated there is a risk to future eye health. The cause of myopia is the eyeball growing too big – and with increasing axial elongation comes the stretching and thinning of the retina the eye is vulnerable to conditions such as retinal detachment and myopic macular degeneration. There is also a growing body of evidence to suggest that behavioural and lifestyle influences along with genetics, are contributing to the myopia ‘epidemic’. Consequently I think more will be done to increase the awareness and identification of myopia with an increased reliance on advanced technology such as 3D retina scanners to aid early diagnosis of this and many other eye conditions.
Finally, I think we will continue to see the negative impact of recession on opticians practices as they try to balance the problem of increasing costs on overheads such as electricity, staff wages, frame and lens price increases and the amount people are willing to spend on new glasses.
