healthy living for women + their families
For many of us, the warmer seasons mean more exercise. And you’re probably taking several safety factors into account: how to protect yourself from dehydration or the sun’s damaging and even deadly rays. We should think about our sight as well. According to the National Institutes of Health, emergency room doctors treated an estimated 42,000 sports-related eye injuries each year.
And 90 percent of them, the NIH says, could have been prevented with protective eyewear.
Exfoliation glaucoma (EG), caused by exfoliation syndrome, a condition in which white clumps of fibrillar material form in the eye, is the most common cause of secondary open-angle glaucoma and a leading cause of blindness and visual impairment. Elevated levels of homocysteine, a non-protein a-amino acid, may increase exfoliation material formation. Research studies have demonstrated that high intake of vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and folate is associated with lower homocysteine levels.
A report published online in in March 2014 in The FASEB Journal may lead the way toward new treatments or a cure for a common cause of blindness called proliferative retinopathies. Scientists at Harvard Medical Schools have shown that the body's innate immune system does more than help ward off external pathogens. It also helps remove sight-robbing abnormal blood vessels, while leaving healthy cells and tissue intact. This discovery is significant because the retina is part of the central nervous system and its cells cannot be replaced once lost.
Get moving and raise a glass now and then if you want to stave off the kind of vision problems that can’t be corrected with lenses. That’s what the results of a study done at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health suggest. The team found that a physically active lifestyle and occasional drinking are associated with a reduced risk of developing visual impairment. The article was published online in March 2014 in Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
A new finding by researchers could help improve vision for adults who are lost without their reading glasses.
Middle-aged people who suddenly need reading glasses, patients with traumatic brain injuries, and people with visual disorders such as "lazy eye" likely have one thing in common — "visual crowding." That’s the inability to recognize individual items surrounded by multiple objects.
Abnormal color vision increases significantly with aging and affects 50% or more of people in the oldest age groups, according to a study done at The Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco and published in the journal Optometry and Vision Science.
With a little practice on a computer or tablet — 25 minutes a day, four days a week, for two months — our brains can actually learn to see better. That is the encouraging finding of research done at the University of California, Riverside and published in the journal Current Biology. Although the team did the training with baseball players at the university who had normal vision, the hope is that the same training, called perceptual learning, will help people with low vision due to cataracts, macular degeneration, or amblyopia.
A layer in the human cornea recently discovered by researchers at The University of Nottingham in the UK turns out to play a vital role in the structure of the tissue that controls the flow of fluid from the eye. The findings could shed new light on glaucoma, a devastating disease caused by defective drainage of fluid from the eye and the world's second leading cause of blindness. The paper was published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology,
Here’s an additional benefit of being active: Moderate aerobic exercise could help slow the progression of retinal degenerative diseases, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD).
The results of the animal study were published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
One of the leading causes of blindness in older people, AMD is caused by the death of light-sensing nerve cells in the retina called photoreceptors.
By Sondra Forsyth
In April of 2013, I went for my annual eye exam. I’ve worn glasses or contacts for distance correction ever since elementary school but over the years, other than the usual age-related need for “readers”, I’ve never had any vision problems. This time, though, I saw a look of concern flash across the optometrist’s face when she did the test for ocular pressure.
“Is something wrong?” I asked.
Research done in Germany and published in the journal Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience suggests that vision restoration after a stroke depends mostly on activity of residual vision that is still left after the injury. The study showed that both local neuronal activity and activity in the immediate surrounding area influence the development of visual recovery "hot spots." The team maintains that this is evidence that recovery of vision is mediated by partially surviving neurons.
