Deep Breathing Increases Tears

[jackolso]

The Wall Street Journal had a story on a Japanese research project involving deep breathing for dry eye relief.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/slow-dee...yes-1422908419

[DryLondoner]

In one of my posts about 8 months ago I mentioned how the only thing that seemed to help redness was lying down and focusing on my breathing. Or something to that effect. Good to know I'm not crazy.

[eyetoeye]

I guess that story refers to the below article. But the study was conducted only with healthy women. I wonder why the researchers did not include dry eye patients also.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25557347

[jackolso]

The link you're pointing to in your post is for the abstract of the paper. The abstract doesn't contain much information.

Healthy women in this study means women who have no eye problems or other issues that would prevent deep breathing. The breathing issue is obvious. The reason they used women who had no detectable eye problems was to control for eye conditions that might interfere with tearing or give abnormal results. This way eye problems were eliminated as a variable so no adjustments to the clinical data was needed.

This was the first test of the breathing theory as a possible way to increase tear production. The researchers are suggesting (and may do themselves) another set of tests on healthy women, healthy men and people with dry eye to see if breathing impacts men and women the same and if the rate of increased tearing is same in those with dry eye. Testing healthy women establishes that the deep breathing works and creates a first baseline for how much tearing increase should be expected.

If men show a different rate of tearing, or if those with dry eye don't tear to level expected, then those results combined with these will suggest explanations and possible issues to explore that separate response in men versus women and dry eye patients from healthy patients.

The main point I got from the paper (and I read the whole paper) is this is a easy, safe thing anyone with dry eye can do. If it doesn't work, it's risk free and inexpensive. If it does work, then it's one more thing DED's can do.