Tear Proteomics Study of Dry Eye Disease: Which Eye Do You Adopt as the Representative Eye for the Study?

Most studies about dry eye disease (DED) chose unilateral eye for investigation and drew conclusions based on monocular results, whereas most studies involving tear proteomics were based on the results of pooling tears from a group of DED patients. Patients with DED were consecutively enrolled for binocular clinical tests, tear biochemical markers of DED, and tear proteome. We found that bilateral eyes of DED patients may have similar but different ocular surface performance and tear proteome. Most ocular surface homeostatic markers and tear biomarkers were not significantly different in the bilateral eyes of DED subjects, and most clinical parameters and tear biomarkers were correlated significantly between bilateral eyes. However, discrepant binocular presentation in the markers of ocular surface homeostasis and the associations with tear proteins suggested that one eye’s performance cannot represent that of the other eye or both eyes. Therefore, in studies for elucidating tear film homeostasis of DED, we may lose some important messages hidden in the fellow eye if we collected clinical and proteomic data only from a unilateral eye. For mechanistic studies, it is recommended that researchers collect tear samples from the eye with more severe DED under sensitive criteria for identifying the more severe eye and evaluating the tear biochemical and proteomic markers with binocular concordance drawn in prior binocular studies.