Contrary to popular belief, your eyesight doesn’t need to deteriorate with age. In fact, many of the complications that affect our vision are tied to other diseases and imbalances within the body. By understanding the underlying diseases and conditions that affect eye health, we can take steps to protect our vision and maintain our vision.
While you may not feel it prudent at a young age to take care of your eyesight or even give it a second thought, damaged eyesight is incredibly difficult to treat and surgery will never restore your vision back to the days of its youth. What most ophthalmologists agree on is that prevention is the best way to treat eye disease. Let’s examine some simple tips you can use to better understand your eye health and maintain your eye health as you age.
Conduct Regular Eye Exams
It’s important to keep up on regular eye exams as you age to diagnose a potential complication before it worsens. Many people will frequently switch their prescription lenses before they’re able to diagnose cataracts. Macular degeneration, glaucoma, and many inherited eye diseases offer no warning signs and are difficult to diagnose without a dilated eye exam.
Aside from diagnosis, dilated eye exams offer people the opportunity to discover more about their vision than they may be aware of. For example, you may learn that you actually see or read better with glasses despite believing you had perfect 20/20 vision. You may even discover more common eye problems, such as an astigmatism.
Understand your Family History
An opthamologist or optometrist will likely ask you about your family history during an eye exam. This is because many common ocular diseases are actually hereditary. It’s not uncommon for children to develop congenital cataracts or far-sightedness as a result of genetics.
Identifying any diseases that your parents or grandparents will alert you to any risk of developing these diseases. Often times prevention can slow or even stop the spread of these diseases before they form. Stargardt’s Disease and Glaucoma are common eye diseases that are inherited later in life, which can be managed by identifying the symptoms early on. Alert your doctor of any family history of eye diseases so that you routinely check for any symptoms and preemptively treat them.
Maintain a Healthy Diet
One of the most significant factors affecting eye health is nutrition. Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over 50 and maintaining a diet rich in lutein, zeaxanthin, zinc, and vitamins C and E can help prevent or slow the development of macular degeneration. Supplements, such as Saffron 2020 have been proven effective in preventing macular degeneration. A diet rich in dark green vegetables and fatty acids is effective in maintaining healthy eyesight.
Numerous diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, high inflammation, and obesity have all been linked to macular degeneration and other eye diseases. Even smoking can be detrimental to your eyesight overtime. Maintaining a healthy diet allows for the eye’s restorative and extracellular functions to filter out debris that can lead to macular degeneration and other harmful eye diseases.
Protect your Eyes
While protecting your eyes may seem obvious there are a number of ways we put our eyes in peril every day. Sunlight, UV light, and radiation significantly damage eyesight overtime and lead to a number of devastating eye diseases later on in life. Even computer strain can degrade vision over time.
Around 2.5 million eye injuries occur each year and most can be prevented by wearing the proper safety gear. Even washing your hands can prevent infections that could affect the eye.
Conclusion
The world is a beautiful canvas that we often take for granted. While we often attribute vision loss or blurry vision to aging, they could represent more malignant affiliations destroying our eyesight. Maintain eye health by taking preventative measures to protect your eyes from strain, trauma, and diseases that could not only destroy your vision, but your way of life.