Men, for example, are more likely to experience sight-threatening eye injuries than women, whereas women tend to be more vulnerable to certain eye diseases. So what can men and women do to address their different eye health concerns?
We do that sort of thing without really thinking about it in moments when we’re tired, when we get something stuck in one eye, or when our eyes feel dry or itchy. It’s an attempt to alleviate the problem, but in reality we could be creating a bigger one, because every time we touch our eyes, we introduce the germs from our fingers (and everything we’ve touched since the last time we washed them) into a sensitive part of our bodies.
Anyone who enjoys a nice tan should be aware of the risks of tanning booths.
March is Workplace Eye Wellness Month, which makes it a great time to discuss eye safety on the job.
Glasses and contact lenses are small things that make a huge difference.
A striking pair of eyes can make a deep impression, and what could be more striking than a pair of eyes that don’t match? In scientific terms, that’s heterochromia, a phenomenon fairly common in cats and dogs but much rarer in humans, affecting only three out of every five hundred people. It comes in a few different varieties and happens for different reasons.
As many as one in six adults struggle with sight-threatening eye conditions and far more than that live with some level of vision loss as they get older. Age is a risk factor for many of the major causes of blindness, including glaucoma, diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration, and cataracts, but there’s a lot we can do to minimize our chances of developing these conditions.
Those of us without perfect eyesight may find it a stressful adjustment each year. It can even be a dangerous one if we don’t take the dangers of night driving into consideration. We can make a big difference in our lives and the lives of those we pass on the road with a few basic precautions.
An autoimmune disease is a disorder that causes the immune system to attack healthy cells. If you or someone you love has an autoimmune disease, it’s important to be aware of these possible effects, so let’s take a closer look at a few of the more common ones.
The main health risk that tends to come to mind with a smoking habit is lung cancer, perhaps followed by oral health problems, but it doesn’t merely harm the parts of the body that come into direct contact with the smoke. Studies show that there is a significant increase in the risk of eye diseases from cataracts to diabetic retinopathy to glaucoma to age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
Melanin helps to protect the eye by absorbing light (including some UV light) that hits the iris, which is the part of the eye that controls the amount of light that reaches the retina.
Getting enough sleep is great for our overall health and our eye health alike. At the other end of things, we can improve the quality of our sleep if we are more careful about what we put in front of our eyes before we go to bed.
For any serious changes, it’s critical to get an early diagnosis. Many sight-threatening conditions that are associated with advancing age are combatted best by being discovered in the early stages. That’s the biggest we encourage more frequent eye exams for older patients, but our eyesight also changes in more benign ways as we get older, and those can be quite an adjustment too.
It’s as important to get preventative care for our eyes as for our teeth, and that means getting eye exams when we don’t need an updated prescription for our glasses or contact lenses. Human eyes are incredibly complex organs with many ways for something to go wrong. Regular eye exams are how we ensure that problems are caught early — the best time to catch them.