Eye diseases and disorders

Glaucoma is a chronical eye disease of the ocular nerve, that in the case of a late diagnosis and inadequate treatment leads to severe eye damage and blindness. In the world, there is more than 70 milions of people suffering from glaucoma. More than a half of them begin a treatment late and on the other hand, based on the latest knowledge about this disease, it apears that many people are treated uselessly. Eye glaucoma is the most often cause of blindness in developed countries.

Many people who need to correct vision problems choose to wear contact lenses instead of eyeglasses, either for cosmetic reasons or comfort issues. Many types or forms of contact lenses come with their own set of problems, however, and one of these problems can be an unpleasant dryness over time. While there is no use specific type of contacts for dry eyes, recent improvements in the materials used to create contact lenses have made them more comfortable for those with dry eye conditions.

Set of causes of dry eye syndrome is complex, eye disease affects not only the ocular surface, but is often accompanied by systemic disease. An important role of psychosomatic aspects (emotional lability of patients), some environmental factors (e.g. ozone, cigarette smoke), wearing contact lenses.

Problem of dry eyes is when the eye does not produce tears correctly and in sufficient quantities, or when the tears do not have the correct consistency and evaporate very quickly. This is a problem with the tear film that keeps the eye moist. This problem manifests itself as a result of different conditions.

Eye inflammations are a very broad subject and it is not possible to describe them in detail in one article. Therefore in this article we will describe them very briefly and gradually we will add more detailed articles about particular inflammatory eye disorders. Eye inflammations can affect almost every part of the eye and its surroundings. They can be simply divided into inflammations of anterior and posterior eye segment - intraocular inflammations and inflammations in the surrounding of the eye.

Diabetes (diabetes mellitus) is a serious disease which affects various organs of the human body. Eyes are also one of them. The consequences of diabetes for sight can be very serious and in the most extreme cases end up with sight loss. In developed countries, diabetic retinopathy is one of the most common causes of blindness. A risk of losing sight is approximately 10-20 times higher for diabetics than for non-diabetic people.

Nowadays there are not any medications or eye drops which could eliminate cataract and improve vision. A surgical procedure is the only option for restoring vision. In this type of procedure opaque intraocular lens is removed and substituted by artificial lens.

Keratoconus is the state when the cornea, which has usually spherical shape, is conically convex and irregularly refractive. This results in worse vision. This eye disease is usually bilateral and the degree of affection in most cases varies from one eye to the other. Convexity and attenuation of the cornea usually progress whether slower or faster and lead to development of short-sightedness and astigmatism and gradually also lead to vision degradation.

Squint, or strabismus as a technical term, is a visual disorder when cooperation between both eyes is disrupted. In such a case each eye points in a different direction. In strabismus if one eye looks directly forward then the other one points inward, outward, upward or downward. The angle of eye deflection from a normal position is called a deviation. Deviation can be permanently visible or it sometimes appears and then disappears.

Damaged fibers of the optic nerve cannot be substituted in any way. Therefore at the moment glaucoma cannot be treated and the only thing we can do is to slow down or stop its further progress. The more damaged is the optic nerve at certain intraocular pressure and the more fibers which are dead then it is even more important to decrease intraocular pressure. Depending on how significantly we need to decrease intraocular pressure, we can opt for conservative, laser or surgical treatment of glaucoma. Eye drops are capable of decreasing it very slightly but surgery has usually higher effect.

Glaucoma can be specified as a group of eye diseases when changes are formed on the optic nerve and they lead to progressive damage of the papilla of this nerve. The formation of glaucoma is influenced by many various risk factors which we often cannot eliminate in any way and that is why it is good to know whether one does not have increased probability of the formation of this disease.

A person with perfect color perception is called normal trichromat. In the cases of disordered color sense we first of all distinguish whether it is congenital or acquired. The cases of congenital disorders are more numerous and more significant.

Color vision disorder when the ability to percept color tones is disabled is known as color blindness. The name color blindness is usually not absolutely precise because the most of affected patients in not able to perceive only certain color what means that they have color vision to some extent. In the case of total color blindness they do not distinguish any color and perceive surrounding world only as black-and-white with different levels of brightness. Color blind people comprise not even 1% of the entire population and the rest can be labeled as color mistaken.

Keratoconus is a degenerative eye disease of the cornea when certain part of the cornea becomes thinner and has a more conical shape. This can gradually change the need for wearing diopters and the vision in general. Because anterior area of the cornea plays a very important role in refractive state of the eye then even a minor change of its radius of curvature can significantly change the quality of the vision.

Signs and symptoms vary according to the type of glaucoma. In the early stages of glaucoma, there are often no symptoms, pain, or change in vision. As the eye disease progresses, a person begins to lose peripheral (side) vision and eventually loses vision completely if left untreated. Acute glaucoma develops suddenly as a result of sudden rise of intraocular pressure due to blockage of fluid drainage from the eye. This requires immediate medical attention in order to prevent permanent vision loss, which can occur within hours or days after the onset.

In most cases, an abnormally high intraocular pressure within the eye causes glaucoma. Inside the eye, fluid is continuously produced and circulated to nourish the nearby tissues, remove unwanted wastes and maintain normal eye pressure. This fluid is not the same as tears, which are produced on the outside of the eye. Fluid leaves the eye through a “drain” located at an angle where the iris and cornea meet. When the fluid drains too slowly out of the eye, the intraocular pressure builds up, causing damage to the optic nerve.

A serious eyesight disorder - blindness has many causes:

Eye diseases

Sight disorder is usually caused by diseases and malnutrition. Majority of general causes of blindness in the world are:

Visual inputs usually come into the eye from the external environment in a normal way but they can be also influenced by various changes in the interior of the eye, for example by the floaters in the vitreous body. Everything has got some bugs … even the eyesight. Does it happen to you sometimes that you look at the sky or other larger and brighter area and all of a sudden you are being disturbed by “eye floaters”? Did they move a bit further when you were trying to focus on them? If you have such problems then do not panic. The diagnosis is: muscae volitantes or eye floaters.

There can be many causes of the origination of dry eyes syndrome. It is decreased productivity of the glands or their extinction as the result of diseases (for example autoimmune diseases). The quality of the tear film is influenced also by hormonal changes or the use of certain medications (for example some antialergics). This disease occurs rather often in women after their menopause.

From the physiological point of view blindness can be defined as the state of sight deficiency. However, the definition, as it is applied to people who are legally classified as blind, is more complex. Total blindness is a permanent and complete loss of sight when the visually handicapped person cannot perceive the light. The significant decrease of vision functions is labeled as practical blindness.