Eye Care Blog

Most of people must suffer one kind of eye conditions in his life. In youth time, if you form a bad habit of reading or writing, it’s of great possibility that you run into eye disorders. Even though you may protect your eyes perfectly, you still have a big chance of gaining eye problems when you’re becoming old. So it’s very essential that the knowledge about eye diseases can be widely spread.

The problem of myopia usually occurs in youth time. It has a close relationship with incorrect use of eyes. In this condition, objects project their images in front of the retina. The sufferers always put the books at a nearer distance to see clearly. Most probably, they sit and read with a crooked posture or work in a dark circumstance too long. It’s no wonder that eyes will feel tired and be out of work. So relieve the stress, your eyes will be better.

Hypermetropia is the opposite condition of myopia. It reflects the objects at the back of the retina. That’s why the sufferers always read books at a far distance. But they can see far things quite clearly without glasses. As a result, we usually occur to meet the hypermetropia reads a book with his glasses hanging on his nose. The trouble is not just wearing a pair of glasses all day. There are more things the hypermetropia must suffer. If he read too long which exceed the time his eyes can bear, eyes will become unclear and eyelids will gain an inflammation. Unfortunately, up to now we still cannot find the real cause of hypermetropia. The disease is due to many complicated factors, and the only thing we can do is to take care of our eyes well.

When comes to presbyopia, we usually link it with middle aged people. That’s right. As time goes by, most of us will inescapably suffer this kind of eye conditions. The symptoms are as the same as hypermertropia. The main difference is the cause of eye disorders. Flabby muscles are the main reason, and no one can go against nature. We can do nothing to prevent being old. However, still someone won’t suffer this disease because of their good habits and pleasant emotions. From this, we should pay more attention to our lifestyle, such as a sitting posture will affect your whole life.

Astigmatism is often accompanied with myopia or hypermetropia. The symptom of astigmatism is that there is no exact focus for those people. Anything they see is not at the right place as they think and the objects will take on a strange looking. Researches show that astigmatism’s eyeball is not a perfect sphere because of the unequal pull of muscles. That’s why astigmatism is caused. Not only patients but also ordinary persons can experience that condition. When staring at one thing for a long time, we come into consciousness that our eyes become strained, the eyesight goes bad and the images present strange shapes. Therefore, a rest means a good care for eyes. In addition, the vast majority of the astigmatism people have mental problems. Objects always have a cheat on them, and they can’t have correct images in the mind. We can’t deny them or cannot despise them. At the same time, the society should show more love and care for them.

Nearly all the eye conditions introduced above are remediable and preventable. If we know how to use our eyes in a right way, eye disorders will be away from us.

Age-related macular degeneration, also known as AMD, is one of the most common eye problems in the world. About six million people are qualified as being at the risk of eyes or suffering from optical affliction in America. People consider it an unavoidable disease and they often feel frustrated about the result, because until recently the treatments for AMD are not very satisfying. Fortunately, there finally come to some tiny delighted news, which is by taking enough antioxidants the AMD problem can be slowed down.

We know most forms of eye diseases are induced by the breakdown of light-sensitive cells in the macular, which is situated at the center of retina at the back of eyes. However, the cause of AMD is due to the loss of eyesight in both center and peripheral part of eyes. Furthermore, there are mainly two kinds of AMD, like wet AMD and dry AMD. Wet AMD, also called neovascular AMD, is caused by excessive fluid under the macular as a result of new blood vessels’ leakage. And dry AMD, is caused by the layer of retinal pigment epithelial cells in the macular becoming too and finally breakdown.

We should thank the optimistic consequence that antioxidants will help in some way to cure AMD. I heard one researcher expressed his regret for not knowing the conclusion earlier. He says if he had known the discovery and began to take antioxidants earlier, he, as well as thousands of suffers, would delay the time of AMD disease attack.

You are suggested to take the antioxidants every day for the sake of your eyes, in the form of common foods, like fruits and vegetables. But the problem is there are not enough dosage of antioxidants in your food you had every day, so sometimes we‘d better to take pills, tablets and capsules to add the dosage. If you are already a high risk suffers of AMD and want to add some antioxidants to your diet, you can begin by taking them in the form of a high potency supplement.

Reference article：

·AMD treatments that are under trials and researches

·FDA-approved treatments for AMD

·Various ways to prevent AMD

When we are getting old, we need to take care of ourselves, not only to our bodies, but also other symptoms happen to us.

When we are over 50 years old, our eyes get more and more fragile, and conditions, such as irritation, dry itchy eyes will happen more frequently.

Dry itchy eyes might seem too minor to pay attention, but they may indicate infection in your eyes. Dry eye syndrome is resulted from lack of tears or immediate evaporation of tears due to infection. In such cases, the production of mucus or lipids could be affected in tear layers.

The main symptoms of dry eye syndrome, dry itchy eyes, along with other symptoms such as extreme redness, irritation, excessive watering, pain, can affect daily activities, so you should find way to cure the disease as soon as possible.

OTC drops are not useful to all the symptoms though they are frequently used. Artificial tears can not only deal with redness, but also itchy and irritation, that’s why they are considered effective.

Artificial tears are your best choice when it comes to an eye problem, but most people don’t know which one is the best.

Reference

·Age-related vision changes and treatments

·Age-related diabetes

·Aging Vision Problems and Solutions

A child’s eye color is always inherited from its parents, even if the influences from each parent may not even. Eye colors include black, gray, green or other combinations.

Eye color is determined by the pigmentation in the iris. Brown eye color is used to be considered as “dominant” and blue being “recessive”. In fact, the eye color involves quite a few variations. It is neither the simple blend of parents’ eye colors, nor certain regular combinations. There are still some eye colors such as gray, hazel and other special combinations that are beyond clear scientific explanation.

One point is obvious that three genes in the body are responsible for eye color inheritance and determine the three most common colors: green, brown and blue. And each parent has two pairs of genes on each chromosome that affect the eye color of their children. Researchers are also focusing on DNA analysis to find out adults’ eye color.

A brown pigment named melanin develops as a baby ages, so that its eye color will darken. It has been revealed that a child’s eye color can be completely different from both of its parents. But children are always born with brown eyes if their parents both have brown eyes.

Some exceptions may happen during births. For example, some children have different colors in two eyes. This exceptional eye color condition is mostly caused by faulty developmental pigment transport. The underlying reasons for this disease may be local trauma in the womb, benign genetic disorder or inflammation of the iris.

Eye color does not stay unchanged lifelong. The eye’s iris controls the pupil size, which enlarges under dim light conditions and contracts under bright lighting. These pupil size changes may lead to slight eye color change. Eye color changes can be natural or signs of eye diseases.

Normal eye color changes relate to mainly two types of factors: emotion and aging. Extreme emotions such as angry and delight can change both pupil size and iris color. Some of Caucasian people are reported to have eye color changes as they age.

Diseases such as Fuch’s heterochromic iridocyclitis, Horner’s syndrome and pigmentary glaucoma can lead to harmful eye color changes.

Also named nearsightedness, myopia is so common today that it is estimated to affect one-third of the population in the world. In contrast to hyperopia which deprive people from close vision, people with myopia can see up-close objects but can not manage distance things such as highway signs.

Similar with hyperopia, myopia also involves irregular eyeball shape. People with myopia have longer eyeballs than normal people, so that light rays are focused in front of the retina. Normal vision requires a light focus right on the retina.

Without proper correction, myopic people always squint to see distance objects and may suffer from headache and eye strain. Those wearing glasses or contact lenses with improper prescription are also bothered by these symptoms. As people age, myopia will stop progressing and become stable, although sometimes it performs myopic creep.

Whether you need full-time eyeglasses or contact lenses wearing depends on your degree of myopia. People with myopia have prescriptions with negative numbers, and a higher number represents a heavier myopia.

Refractive surgeries are becoming popular since they can reshape the cornea of myopic patients and eliminate the need for glasses. PRK and LASIK are two of the available refractive surgeries, both of which use an excimer laser. While a PRK just removes a layer of corneal tissue and flattens the cornea, a LASIK involves a flap cut through the top of the cornea.

For night wear, special contact lenses applying orthokeratology (ortho-k) can reshape the cornea over time and provide clear vision during daytime without lenses or glasses. As implantable lenses, phakic IOLs can deal with special situations that are beyond LASIK and PRK. These IOLs are permanently placed in the eye during the surgery, eliminating any maintenance.

There is also pathologic myopia, which is extremely severe and can not be corrected by any of the above treatments. This type of myopia occurs in children with extremely elongated eyeball by age 12. The situation will worsen as children age and unfortunately develop abnormal growth of new blood vessels. There was no effective treatment during a long period until the approval of drug Visudyne along with non-thermal laser application in 2001. This treatment named photodynamic therapy has been proved to be effective.

THE Sydney South West Area Health Service has rejected the NSW Opposition’s claims that patients are waiting too long for eye surgery at Liverpool Hospital.

Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner said 376 patients were waiting for ophthalmology surgery at the hospital, most of whom need cataract surgery.

She said on average patients waited up to six months for ophthalmic surgery at the hospital.

But a spokeswoman for the health service said patients needing ophthalmic surgery at Liverpool Hospital were receiving it well within benchmark times.

“Patients are prioritised according to need. Those classified as most urgent, or category A, are on average scheduled for surgery within 15 days, well within the 30-day benchmark,” she said.

“Category B patients are seen within 36 days, well within the 90-day benchmark, and category C patients requiring surgery within 12 months, are on average receiving treatment in under nine months.

“Liverpool Hospital recently increased the number of ophthalmic surgery sessions being performed to address the increasing demand and help to further reduce waiting times for patients.”

Mrs Skinner said waiting times would increase due to Federal Government cuts to the Medicare rebates for cataract surgery.

The rebate for common cataract surgery has been reduced by 45 per cent from $623.70 to $340.76.

“(It) means more people will be thrown into an already crowded public system, (and) will wait even longer,” Mrs Skinner said.

In a written statement, Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon told the Leader advances in technology have meant that cataract surgery is now quicker and cheaper.

“We believe patients and taxpayers, not specialists – earning on average $500,000 a year from Medicare alone – should reap the benefits of these improvements,” she said.

Article source:firmooglass.wordpress.com

U.S. researchers report the drug rituximab helped six patients with Graves’ eye disease.

The study, published in the journal Ophthalmology, said the drug was used only after the patients did not respond to usual treatment.

One of the study researchers, Dr. Raymond S. Douglas of the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center in Ann Arbor, said Graves’ eye disease — an autoimmune disease with inflammation and fatty deposits in the eye muscles and connective tissue around the eye — is more common in women than men. Symptoms include bulging eyes, retracted eyelids, dry eyes, and, in severe cases, loss of vision.

Douglas, who was at the University of California-Los Angeles when he treated the study participants, said while the results from such a small number must be viewed with some caution, the substantial benefits seen in these patients provide good reason to do a large-scale clinical trial.

“These patients had already received the maximum level of steroid treatment,” Douglas said in a statement. “Treatment with rituximab calmed inflammation, stopped progression of the disease, and saved the patients from having to undergo surgery.”

Trachoma is a eye disease that starts as conjunctivitis but gradually, with repeated infection, turns the eyelashes inwards so that they scrape the cornea, scarring it, rendering it opaque, causing blindness. As it is easily treated with antibiotics, trachoma is regarded as a disease of poverty and is now unknown in developed countries – except Australia.

Even in the developing world – in Gambia, Malawi and Nepal, where it was once endemic – trachoma and trichiasis (the eye-scraping stage) have all but disappeared. Ghana, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Morocco and Oman all now report the disease eliminated. In Australia’s chattering fringes it is also unknown.

But in Katherine, almost a quarter of the children aged five to 15 test positive to trachoma. Without treatment, they’ll go blind. The official incidence in this country is 20,000 among children alone, and that’s just the ones we know about. In more remote areas, cases are often simply unrecorded.

How can this be? How in a nation where the rich and their physicians habitually rort the system to cheat Medicare out of exorbitant cosmetic procedures, in the very nation that produced and reveres Fred Hollows, can avoidable blindness still be rife? Why does the simple fact of it not embarrass us to the point of excruciation, as if it were our eyeballs being grated?

Well, perhaps it does. Perhaps we’re so embarrassed we can’t think about it. So embarrassed we’re happy for the Federal Government to toss yet another $58.3 million at the problem, as it did in February, and hope it’ll go away.

This is a strategy you might call voluntary avoidable blindness. It is abetted by our extraordinarily vivid concept of the continent as a vast, vacant interior ringed (or perhaps girt) by a fertile, febrile megalopolitan fringe where most of us live, deafened by our own frantic chatter.

But it’s a strategy that is unlikely to work. For it isn’t just trachoma, or even just health. It’s housing, hygiene, violence, infant mortality, substance abuse, sexual abuse, education, employment, home ownership, life expectancy, wealth and diet. Across all the parameters, even according to the official Council of Australian Governments report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators 2009, things indigenous are stagnating or getting worse.

The American Academy of Ophthalmology has ever claimed that diabetic people are 25 times more likely to lose vision than normal individuals. However, there are less serious eye diseases that are also caused by diabetes, such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. It is widely known that diabetic patients can not use and store sugar in a normal way, resulting in high blood sugar. This condition may damage the blood vessels and diabetic retinopathy will be caused. More seriously, scar tissue can be caused and leads to retinal detachment.

External symptoms of mild and advanced diabetic retinopathy include floaters and double vision. If you have difficulty in reading, there is probably macular edema from fluid built-up in the macula. Double vision is caused by the affection of eye nerves. For precise diagnosis, a test named fluorescein angiography will be carried out. Injected into the body, the dye will be tracked during its spread with blood flow. Evaluation of the result photos can determine the severity of diabetic retinopathy.

High blood-sugar in diabetic patients brings great risk and they do not know when diabetic retinopathy happens. Once diagnosed with diabetes, patients should take a dilated eye exam every year, in order to detect early diabetic retinopathy signs.

Diabetic retinopathy has different stages. An early form of diabetic retinopathy displays in fluid leakage and bleeding in the retina, which cause retina to swell and build up deposit. Experts define this form of diabetic retinopathy as non-proliferative retinopathy or background retinopathy. Also named proliferative retinopathy, a later stage of retinopathy is much more serious. New blood vessels begin to grow and break and bleed into the center of the eye, which may lead to blindness.

There are many ways to reduce the risk of developing diabetic retinopathy. Since the disease is mostly associated with diabetes, the most preventive way is to control your blood-sugar level. Regular exercises and healthy diet are important. For early detection, you should monitor your blood pressure regularly.

With early detection and treatment, diabetic retinopathy can be treated successfully at a percentage of 95. For normal diabetic retinopathy, a painless procedure named laser photocoagulation can be used to seal off leaking blood vessels and remove new vessel growth. Diabetic-caused cataracts can be cured with cataract surgery. Investigational treatments for diabetic retinopathy are reported to improve the patient’s vision and Lucentis and Avastin initially used for macular degeneration have been proved to be effective for diabetic retinopathy in stopping vision loss.

Eye twitching bothers many people and even drives them crazy. Actually, it is pretty common and mostly happens to the lower eyelid. Eyelid tics can last for weeks and even months but most of them are benign and harmless. However, there are still other forms of eyelid twitching that are more serious because they may caused by neurological conditions such as blepharospasm and hemifacial spasm.

People’s bodies react to stress differently, and some people may suffer from eye twitching caused by excessive stress, especially those with eye strain. Vision-related stress may result from eyeglasses wearing and long period computer use. People have persistent eyelid twitching that caused by vision-related stress should take an exam for potential vision correction. Insufficient sleep, too much caffeine and alcohol consumption can trigger eye twitches. These conditions are easy to deal with.

Eyelid twitching can also result from dry eye. There are many reasons for eye dryness, such as natural aging, excessive computer use, antihistamine taking, contact lenses wearing and so on. All of these reasons are curable by various treatments.

Nutritional imbalance is suspected to cause eye twitching, even though there is no scientific evidence. Experts suggest that patients should talk nutritional conditions with family doctor for professional advice, rather than buying random nutritional products. Histamine is also indicated to bring eyelid twitching, so that antihistamine eye drops or tablets may be prescribed to provide help.

Persistent eye twitching can be stopped by Botox injections, which can successfully terminate muscle contractions. Severe eye twitching may clamp shut your eyelid, and you should see a doctor for precise diagnosis.