Elderly Blindness — Common Causes and Their Treatment

Visual impairment among elderly is now a major health care problem. We are living in aging population with 80% of blind people or people who have visual impairment are older than 50 years. The most common causes of blindness for this groups are age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataract and diabetic retinopathy. These are four most common causes of blindness which doctors and researches are keen to cure.

Age-related macular degeneration is characterized by loss of central vision area. This sight decrement come as result of degeneration of macula (retina area which responsible for central vision). Glaucoma largely related to damage in nerve optic. Cataract is the leading cause of blindness in elderly people. Patients with cataract developed lens opacities which progress slowly. Diabetic retinopathy is vision impairment related to diabetic patients. Most people known this disease as “diabetes eye”. This diabetes eye usually encounters during first few years when patients diagnosed with diabetic. With ageing population, poor diet and rising obesity, diabetic retinopathy is became an increasing threat to major blindness in many countries.

Symptoms of Four Common Causes of Vision Loss

Age-related macular degeneration symptoms:
Blurred vision, image distortion, central scotoma, and difficulty reading.

Glaucoma symptoms:
Visual field loss and blurred vision (late).

Cataract symptoms:
Blurred vision, glare, and monocular diplopia.

Diabetic retinopathy symptoms:
Blurred vision, floaters, visual field loss, and poor night vision

Age-Related Macular Degeneration.

It’s not come as a surprise that carotenoids contained in food has demonstrated to lower risk of developing major visual impairment disease. Its nature as antioxidants can protect retina from any potential damage. Higher diet of rich carotenoids foods may lower the risk of exudative age-related macular degeneration (wet type). This substance can be found in kiwi, yellow squash, spinach, peas, green beans, apples, corn, grapes, peppers, cucumber, orang ejuice, broccoli. Recently, intravitreal injections of some drugs which have the ability to suppress vascular endothelial growth factor have been introduced. They are known as ranibizumab and bevacizumab and used for Age-related macular degeneration. However, the effect of these drugs is unknown for the long-term safety.

Cataract Prevention and Cataract Surgery.

Your doctor may told you to avoid sunlight and wear sunglasses to filter out harmful Ultraviolet light. This is the obvious way in cataracts prevention. Recently researchers suggested dark green leaf vegetable can be used to prevent this disease. This veggies are rich with antioxidants which are believed in cataracts prevention. But perhaps cataract surgery is the best advice and common surgical procedure that doctors would advise to patients. This surgery should be considered if vision reduction has interfered daily activities. The output of surgery is significant visual improvement over 90 % of patients after undergoing cataract surgery.

Glaucoma Signs and Symptoms.

As mentioned above, glaucoma is related to nerve optic damage. Medical therapy is the preferred choice for glaucoma treatment. Medications are centered in an effort to lower the pressure on intraocular inside eyes or reducing secretation outflow on trabecular meshwork. You should take extra precautions for having treatment due to its widely known side effects. This medical therapy are recognized to have systematic side effects ranging from headache, fatigue, muscle joint, sleep disturbances and heart disease failure. This is not come as surprise because the medications are working mostly in nervous systems.

Diabetic Retinopathy.

As you can probably tell by its name, this kind of visual impairment is related with diabetic. It is thus important to cure or control blood sugar level first. Intensive blood glucose control has shown good result in reducing the development and progression of diabetic retinopathy in Diabetic Type 1 (insulin-dependent) and Type 2 (non insulin-dependent). Regulating hypertension, hyperlipidemia and renal failure are something to accompanying main treatment. Those combinations will further reduce the adverse effects of diabetic retinopathy disease.©