Long-Term Health Issues That Can Affect Your Eyesight
If you’re hoping to preserve your vision throughout your life, it’s crucial to ensure that you’re in good health overall. Alongside avoiding direct sunlight and accidental injuries, good nutrition, regular exercise, and regular exams can help prevent many eye health issues.
Regular visits to an eye doctor can provide numerous benefits in addition to maintaining healthy eyes. Examining the lens of the eye, retina, and optic nerve can reveal a variety of chronic diseases that can affect the whole body, including high blood pressure and diabetes, usually before any other symptoms occur. An eye examination is one of the few exams where eye doctors can look into the body without performing the blood test, using invasive imaging or surgery.
Medical Conditions and Eye Health
A large number of patients are affected by various eye issues. Many of these issues are caused by medical conditions that don’t have anything to do with the eyes initially. Let’s consider a few diverse medical ailments and how they might cause issues with one’s eyesight and overall eye health.
1. Diabetes
Diabetic retinopathy is a condition found in people who have had diabetes for an extended period and have not been treated. This disorder, associated with excessive blood sugar, causes the eye’s blood vessels to bleed into the retina. This can cause significant vision loss or sometimes even complete blindness in some circumstances. In addition, cataracts and Glaucoma are eye diseases most likely to develop when people have diabetes.
You can visit an eye care center in Bloomington, IN, to know if you’re suffering from illnesses or other eye disorders.
2. Hypertension
High blood pressure of a person can cause severe damage to blood vessels in the same way that high blood sugar could. Because of the thickening of the retinal blood vessels caused by hypertension, less blood can get to the retina.
The accumulation of fluid under the retina, damage in the optic nerve, and macular edema arise from insufficient oxygen supply to your eye. Hypertensive retinal retinopathy refers to the medical name that describes this problem.
3. Multiple Sclerosis
The immune system fights against the myelin sheath, which shields the optic nerve, and facilitates the quick and precise transfer of visual signals from the eyes to the brain. Optic nerve inflammation and fast vision loss ensue because of the loss of signaling. Optic neuritis refers to the medical name for this condition.
The symptoms of this condition can include difficulty moving your eyes without discomfort, blurred vision, loss of color vision as well as a hole in the middle of your vision, a headache, and in the extreme, blindness.
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4. Autoimmune Conditions
The eyes are at risk of an array of immune-mediated disorders. The immune system activates its tissues, which is seen in the condition known as rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE). Autoimmune disorders typically manifest at first by causing symptoms in the eyes.
Initially, a patient’s eyes might appear red, itchy, or dry. Patients may experience eye pain, sensitivity to light, changes in vision quality, or even vision loss if the illness is not detected or treated.
5. Thyroid Disease
In cases of a hyperactive thyroid, such as Graves disease, the antibodies are also directed at the cells of the eye area because their receptors are identical to thyroid cells. Graves’ disease affects the eyes and causes ophthalmopathy or orbitopathy.
The symptoms of the diseases discussed above include the blurred, double-vision effect, eyes that are swollen, redness and inflammation of the conjunctiva, and proptosis. The optic nerve is compressed and unable to close the eye, causing corneal ulcers, and, in the most extreme cases, blindness may result from the condition.