Contact lenses may help you see glasses-free, but it may not be the best for your eyes.
A new study suggests that wearing contact lenses may change the community of bacteria living in your eyes, according to Discovery News.
“The eye has a normal community of bacteria, expected to confer resistance to invaders,” stated senior study investigator Maria Gloria Dominguez-Bello, PhD, associate professor of the Human Microbiome Program at New York University School of Medicine.
Inserting contact lenses can reportedly disrupt the “delicate” balance among the bacteria in your eye, according to TIME.
The surface of the eye in the people who wore contact lenses reportedly had triple the proportion of certain bacteria species, on average, compared with the people in the study who did not wear the lenses.
For the study, researchers reportedly compared the colonies of bacteria living on the eyeballs of people who wear contact lenses to the eyes of those who don’t. 20 people were reportedly recruited for the new research.
Researchers reportedly swabbed different parts of the eye and sequenced the bacteria to find major differences between lens-wearers and people who didn’t wear lenses.
“Our research clearly shows that putting a foreign object, such as a contact lens, on the eye is not a neutral act,” stated Dominguez-Bello said in a statement.
Although individuals may experience altered bacterial community in the eye, most do not experience complications related to wearing lenses, according to Dr. Mark Fromer, an ophthalmologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
Taking extra care of cleanliness when wearing lenses can prevent potential complications.
“Wash your hands, change your lens solution every day, keep your lens case clean,” stated Fromer.