How to Prevent Blindness

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. Jim Kirkconnell of Bellevue Eye Care Center, in Nashville, Tennessee. We have a question today which is how to prevent blindness, and I will first talk about in North America because it's different worldwide. In North America the leading causes of blindness are macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and then glaucoma. And in macular degeneration it's the center part of our vision where the center focus is that is affected. That area is called the macula, and the very center of that is called the fovea where we have two thousand cone cells for our very best central fitrophy vision. When we get older some of those cells will die and there's two ways that they're affected. One is called the dry kind where they just die and your vision is smudgy. That is something that's slow to happen and it's usually only affects one eye. In the wet kind the, underneath the retina you'll get a capillary membrane that'll grow and that disrupts the the 20/20 cells, and that's something that happens in the center vision here, so that one is about ten percent of the time and it's it's more severe. In diabetes, the the retina will actually not get as much oxygen as we want it to but that's just the nature of diabetes, and will have if it is advanced, which is typically somebody who is insulin diabetic for more than five years, because it wants more oxygen will have capillaries which will actually grow inward towards the center of the eye and then they'll contract, and if it's not treated then you will get a a actual retinal detachment which is the retina falling down and it will, in three days it will typically, the retina will die because it doesn't have oxygen. And that's how you become blind with diabetes. Other than the fact that you can have capillaries that grow in your center vision which can also be considered macular degeneration. In glaucoma what happens is there's a pressure builds up in the eye, and the the wall of the eye doesn't care about that, but the optic nerve is a neural tissue and what happens is it's pressed on and there are different fiber bundles which can be pressed on and it disrupts the circulation of those fiber bundles, and then you end up... In the beginning, you need more light in order to see things which that's tested by visual field, and then you can have areas in your vision which just become blind, or you can have if it's severe enough and enough time goes by you can actually become stone blind. In summary, there are different reasons that one can go blind. In the United States it's more commonly glaucoma, macular degeneration, and diabetic retinopathy, and it's important to have regular check-ups to make sure that you don't have these problems. The recommendation is that if you're past the age of forty you should have a professional eye exam every year. If you're of a school aged child it should be every year, and if you've had an exam and you don't have any health problems between the ages of nineteen and thirty nine every two years is fine."