Eye Health

Long hours on smartphones may affect eyesight

A woman in China, who spent many hours peering at her smartphone in the dark, found that her right retina had become detached.

Liu felt her right eye had been “veiled” since last week. Liu habitually plays with her smartphone for two to three hours each day in the dark, Xinhua reported Saturday.

“When the doctor covered my left eye, everything I saw with my right was distorted. Rectangular objects become elliptical,” she said.

The doctor who treated Liu said she suffered a partial retina detachment and blamed using her smartphone in the dark for the trouble.

Zhao Bingkun, an ophthalmologist in Zhejiang province, said long hours staring at bright screen in the dark can cause the ciliary muscle to overcontract, affecting its ability to accommodate the changes in the lens when viewing objects at varying distances.

Retina detachment can lead to blindness, and ophthalmologists are seeing a growing number of patients suffering from the condition after staring at the screens of computers and handsets for too long.

A man in China’s Fujian province, who spent 10 hours each day running a shop at online marketplace Taobao.com, lost vision in his right eye in November last year.

In a country increasingly obsessed with staying wired, health professionals have long called for self-restraint and proper protection by smartphone and tablet users.

Source: DNA india

The Odd Ways Pregnancy Can Cause Vision Problems

Pregnancy can cause vision problems in sometimes unexpected ways, as two new medical reports show.

In one report, a 25-year-old first-time mother experienced blurred vision and flashes of light in both eyes when she was 36 weeks into her pregnancy.

An eye exam showed she had damage to the back of her eye, including swelling of the optic nerve. Another test showed the woman also had extremely high blood pressure, and a urine sample revealed she had abnormally high levels of protein in her urine.

Doctors determined that her eye problems were caused by severe preeclampsia, a complication of pregnancy involving high blood pressure and high levels of protein in the urine, according to the case reported by the researchers, from Mohammed V University in Morocco

The only cure for preeclampsia is to deliver the baby, and the woman underwent a prompt Caesarean section. She had a baby boy, who, despite his low birth weight, appeared to be healthy. Three months later, the woman’s vision was back to normal, the researchers said.
Source: Yahoo news

Soon, ‘vision-restoring drug’ that will let blind eyes see light

Researchers have developed a compound that can be effectively used for treating patients suffering from degenerative retinal disorders such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

The retina has three layers of nerve cells, but only the outer layer contains the rod and cone cells that respond to light, enabling us to see the world. When the rods and cones die during the course of degenerative blinding diseases, the rest of the retina remains intact but unable to respond to light.

Dr. Richard Kramer of the University of California, Berkeley and his colleagues have invented “photoswitch” chemicals that confer light sensitivity on these normally light-insensitive ganglion cells, restoring light perception in blind mice.

An earlier photoswitch required very bright ultraviolet light, making it unsuitable for medical use. However, a new chemical, named DENAQ, responds to ordinary daylight. Just one injection of DENAQ into the eye confers light sensitivity for several days.

Experiments on mice with functional, nonfunctional, or degenerated rods and cones showed that DENAQ only impacts ganglion cells if the rods and cones have already died.

It appears that degeneration in the outer retina leads to changes in the electrophysiology in the inner retina that enables DENAQ photosensitization, while the presence of intact photoreceptors prevents DENAQ action.

The selective action of DENAQ on diseased tissue may reduce side effects on healthy retina, exactly what is desired from a vision-restoring drug.

The study was published in the Cell Press journal Neuron.

Source; Business standard