Eye Diseases and Preventing Them in an Easy Way

Many scientific studies show that prolonged exposure to the sun without adequate protection can really cause permanent damage to the eyes. The culprits here are ultraviolet light (UV) and glares reflected off from water, pavement, metallic surfaces, sand, and snow. These blinding reflections can actually burn the surface of the eye (cornea and conjunctiva). While long-term exposure to these factors will eventually involve internal structures including the lens and retina.

Popular eye diseases caused by the sun are cataracts, macular degeneration, and cancer. But in this section, we’re going to focus on photokeratitis or corneal flash burn and pterygium. We may have heard about these two eye diseases but it’s also important to know what are they and how to prevent them.

Corneal flash burn, as what the name implies, refers to the burning of cornea caused by the sun’s light itself, too much glare from surfaces that are mentioned above and artificial sources of UVB, which include tanning beds, welder’s arc, lightning, and electric sparks. The following sensation is likened to having sand poured into eyes. However, symptoms include tearing, pain, redness, swollen eyelids, headache, and temporary loss  of vision, all of which may appear  within 6-12 hours of exposure.

Pterygium, on the other hand, is characterized by a benign grown on the conjunctiva. Althoug may occur in the lateral or medial side of an eye, it commonly grows from the nasal side because of the passing of sun’s rays laterally through the cornea where it undergoes refraction and becomes focused on the medial limbus. The shadow of the nose however reduces the intensity of the light that focuses on the lateral limbus, that which accounts to the predominance of pterygia on the nasal side. Symptoms of the disease include redness, inflammation, dry and itchy eyes, and foreign body sensation. It’s important to consider that pterygium is a threat to normal vision as it invades the cornea and may potentially induce astigmatism and corneal scarring.

Now that you have additional ideas of how the sun may damage your eyes, we hope that these potential damages may motivate you to take the initiative for prevention like wearing sunglasses and goggles during daytime or whenever you’re exposed to environment that harbours eye-damaging factors. There are lots of wholesale eyewear products around which we can get at fair prices and we can never say that we didn’t have an option to prevent such misfortune. This is the least one can do so don’t ever wait to see for yourself before you believe.