International contact lens prescribing in 2007

Our annual review of international prescribing trends reports on close to 20,000 prospectively conducted fits in 27 countries. We've reported the results of our international survey of contact lens prescribing each year in this journal since 2002, and our analysis for 2007 represents our most wide-ranging study to date. In this article, we report on the outcomes of 19,971 contact lens fits performed in 27 countries. As in all previous years, the study was prospective in that we asked practitioners to provide information about their first 10 patients prescribed with contact lenses after they received paper or electronic survey forms. One thousand practitioners were approached in most countries, with a smaller number of questionnaires sent in markets where the total number of contact lens practitioners was fewer than this. The precise composition of the practitioner cohort (the proportion of ophthalmologists, optometrists and opticians) necessarily varied by country, but we chose a randomized selection of those practitioners licensed to fit contact lenses in each case.