chronic watery eyes (a) may signal hyperthyroidism; excess thyroid hormone causes orbital tissues to swell and become irritated. High blood-sugar levels due to diabetes can starve blood vessels of oxygen, causing your eyes to grow new collateral blood vessels (b). Overtime, untreated high blood pressure can cause narrowing of eye blood vessels and hemorrhaging. (c) in the area. Plaque from a clogged carotid artery (d) can break off and travel into your retinal blood vessels—a warning sign that you’re at risk of astroke. A brain tumor is one health threat that can increse pressure in your brain, which puts stress on the optic nerve

It’s hard to stay away from a computer. It’s a fact of modern life. We spend at least a few hours a day on the computer constantly staring at a screen. We work on them, we use them to network and owing to the various social sites, some people live out their lives sitting in front of a computer. While computers are a necessity, staring at a screen all day can cause severe damage to the eyes and the damage associated with staring at computer screens even has its own name; the doctors call it Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS).

This is a condition that almost everyone who uses a computer faces and at times, people aren’t even aware that they suffer from the said condition.

Cause and effect
CVS is a very real problem for all people who spend hours in front of any computer screen on a daily basis. In fact, a study conducted in the US showed that 85 per cent of computer users are prone to CVS. Closer to home in India, the statistics are more alarming as the demographic most affected by CVS happens to be young students and professionals, which means a very young section of the population is putting themselves at risk.

The American Optometric Association defines CVS as, “A collection of symptoms experienced by computer users in the course of their work.” The symptoms include fatigue, headaches, dry eyes, inability to maintain near focus, progressive refractive (spectacles) changes, neck and shoulder discomfort, changes in colour perception and pain in or around the eyes. These symptoms can get worse due to inappropriate overhead lighting or glare and if the eyes are exposed to direct air from a fan or vent.

In addition, while the normal blink rate of any individual is around 16-20 per minute, the rate for computer users is 6-8 blinks. In addition, staring at the screen for a long time can put undue strain on the eye muscles.

Prevention and cure
While CVS is a very real problem, there are ways to combat it and even avoid it. Ensure you get your eyes checked by a doctor regularly, remember to blink often and take breaks while working on a computer. In addition…

* Consider computer eyewear: The use of proper, focussed computer eyewear is a better option than contact lenses as the latter may aggravate the problem due to their ability to cause CLIDE (contact lens induced dry eyes).
* Adjust the brightness and contrast of your screen:

Try looking at the white background of a web page and if it looks like a light source, it’s too bright. In addition, adjusting the screen settings is important to make sure that there is a significant contrast between the screen background and the on-screen characters. Similarly, the text size and colour need to be adjusted so that looking at it takes minimum effort.

* Listen to your doctor:
If you do have CVS and have been advised to take medication by a doctor, follow the prescription and get checked regularly so that the condition doesn’t worsen.

TAKE CARE
* Staring at a computer all day can cause severe damage to the eyes.

* CVS is a collection of symptoms that people who use the computer for long hours face.

* The symptoms include, fatigue, headaches, dry eyes, inability to maintain near focus, progressive refractive (spectacles) changes, neck and shoulder discomfort among others.

* With a few preventive measures like getting your eyes checked regularly, using focussed computer eyewear, adjusting the brightness of the computer screen and following your doctor’s advice can help.

Green tea has always been known for its antioxidant effects and disease fighting properties, but now researchers say the benefits could help the eyes.

The report, the first to study how the lens, retina and other eye tissues absorb these substances, suggests that the drink may protect against glaucoma and other common eye diseases, reports telegraph.co.uk.

Writing in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Chi Pui Pang and colleagues say that “catechins”, a type of antioxidant found in green tea, can pass from the stomach to tissues in the eye.

Catechins include vitamin C, vitamin E and it had not been known whether they could aid vision.

But the researchers at Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Eye Hospital, experimenting on rats, found that the rodents given the tea showed their eyes benefiting from the catechins.

The team concluded: “Our results indicate that green tea consumption could benefit the eye against oxidative stress”.

In a bid to spread awareness about glaucoma, an eye disease that is the second leading cause of blindness across the world and is expected to rise as the population ages, eyecare professionals here as elsewhere are observing World Glaucoma Week until March 13.

According to B.Sridhar Rao, president of the Glaucoma Society of India, an NGO that aims to sensitise people about the disease, 12 million Indians suffer from the disease.

“Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide. Glaucoma currently affects approximately 12 million people in India and 65 million people worldwide – numbers that can be expected to increase as the population ages,” Rao said.

“Unfortunately, many people with glaucoma are unaware that they have it until there is a large amount of irreversible vision loss,” he added.

Glaucoma is often nicknamed the “sneak thief of sight” because the loss of vision normally occurs gradually over a long period of time and is often only recognised when the disease is quite advanced.

Glaucoma week, being observed since March 7, aims to make people aware of the disease and emphasises the importance of regular eye checks.

Washington, Nov 10  : A research team, including an Indian-origin boffin, has found that laser eye surgery that corrects vision does not lead to later problems with the cornea – at least not after nine years.

Two types of laser surgery—photorefractive keratectomy (PRK) and laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK)—are often used to correct refractive errors such as nearsightedness.

However, little is known about how these procedures affect the cornea, the transparent membrane covering the eye, on the cellular level over the long term.

Sanjay V. Patel, M.D., and William M. Bourne, M.D., of Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., studied 29 eyes of 16 patients who had undergone LASIK or PRK. Photographs of the cells lining the cornea (endothelial cells) were taken and analysed before and nine years after surgery.

The annual rate of corneal endothelial cell loss in the eyes of patients who had had surgery was compared with those of 42 eyes that had not undergone either procedure.

Nine years after surgery, the density of cells lining the cornea had decreased by 5.3 percent from their preoperative state.

However, the average annual rate of cell loss (0.6 percent) was the same in corneas of eyes that were operated on and those that were not.

“Our results support the findings of numerous short-term studies that found no significant endothelial cell loss after LASIK and PRK,” the authors said.

They added: “The importance of the findings in our study relates to using corneas that have undergone LASIK or PRK as donor tissue.”
The study has been reported in the November issue of Archives of Ophthalmology, one of the JAMA/Archives journals

Scary music sounds more scary with eyes shut, a new study has found.

The simple act of voluntarily closing one’s eyes instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself, said Talma Hendler, neuroscience professor at Tel Aviv University (TAU).

The experience of scary music becomes more emotionally and physically intense. And the converse may well be true: happy music could produce a joyous effect when our eyes are shut as well.

Hendler’s research suggests that when our eyes are closed, a region in our brain called the amygdala which is the seat of emotions is fired up.

The latest study is “just an example of how a small manipulation in one’s physical state such as eyes open or shut can change our mental experience,” she said.

This phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating neurological diseases, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s included, said the neuroscientist.

Listening to sounds with our eyes closed seems to wire together a direct connection to the regions of our brains that process emotions, says Hendler. “Music is a relatively abstract emotional carrier.”

“Using a functional MRI (fMRI), we can see that distinct changes in the brain are more pronounced when a person’s eyes are not being used.”

Yulia Lerner, a post-doctoral fellow at Hendler’s lab, had healthy volunteers listen to spooky Hitchcock-style music, and then neutral sounds with no musical melody.

They listened to these twice, once with their eyes open and a second time with their eyes shut, as she monitored their brain activity with an fMRI.

While volunteers were listening to the scary music, Lerner found that brain activity peaked when the subjects’ eyes were closed. This medical finding corresponded to volunteer feedback that the subjects felt more emotionally charged by the scary music.

“We don’t know exactly how or why this happens — it’s like a light switch gets turned off, allowing the brain to better integrate the highs and lows of the emotional experience when the eyes are shut,” adds Hendler.

Small physical behaviours can radically alter the balance and colour of emotions. Not long ago in US classrooms, teachers found that hyperactive students learned better while standing, rather than sitting at their desks, said a TAU release.

Her study was published in PLoS One and builds on her 2007 study published in Cerebral Cortex.

Eye protection may be required on the job, but don’t forget to protect your eyes at home, too.

The U.S. National Safety Council says you should always wear protective eye gear when you:

* Work on do-it-yourself projects around the house or on your car.
* Cook with ingredients that could splash into the eye and cause burns or injury.
* Work with chemicals such as pesticides, fertilizers, drain cleaners or cleaning sprays.
* Play sports such as tennis, racquetball or baseball.
* Do yard work, such as mowing the lawn, trimming plants or cutting weeds.

A user-friendly forearm crutch with an in-built sensor has been developed to monitor whether or not it is being used correctly.

The new crutch is based on low-cost, off-the-shelf technology and sensors similar to those used in Nintendo Wii.

“A growing number of people are in need of physiotherapy. But reports from physiotherapists indicate that people do not always use crutches in the correct manner. Until now, there has been no way to monitor this, even though repeated incorrect use of the crutch could make the patient’s injury worse,” said Neil White, a professor at the University of Southampton.

Georgina Hallett, a member of Sothampton team that developed the intelligent crutch, said: “These crutches will make it much easier for patients to be taught how to use them properly, and how much weight they are allowed to put through their injured leg.”

“This will help them to get out of hospital faster and also reduce their risk of further damaging an already injured leg by putting too much or too little weight through it.”

The crutch is fitted with three accelerometers that detect movement and force sensors that measure the weight being applied to a patient’s leg and the position of his/her hand on the grip, said a Southampton release.

Data is transmitted wirelessly to a remote computer and visual information is displayed on the crutch if the patient uses it incorrectly.

A year after receiving gene therapy for a condition that causes total blindness by age 30, three people continue to see better and one has improved enough to read the digital numbers on the clock in her parents’ car, US researchers said.
Improvements in the vision of the three volunteers — all legally blind and in their 20s — has not deteriorated over time, doctors involved in the experiment reported in New England Journal of Medicine.
One of the three has also developed a kind of “second sight” because her brain has learned to tap information from an area of the retina rejuvenated by gene therapy.
“The initial improvements were very substantial and occurred in a matter of weeks,” Dr Artur Cideciyan of the University of Pennsylvania said in a telephone interview.
But in one patient, a woman, her vision has continued to improve because her brain has apparently learned to use information from the treated portion of the eye, allowing her to read the clock.
“It’s very encouraging to see that the adult brain seems to be adapting to this vision,” Cideciyan said.
The three — two men and the woman — suffer from a form of Leber’s congenital amaurosis, an otherwise-untreatable condition that robs infants and children of most of their vision. All had been legally blind since birth because a gene known as RPE65, which produces a special form of vitamin A for retinal cells, was defective.
The experiment was one of several attempts by various research teams to fix genetic problems by injecting properly functioning DNA into a virus and using the virus to deliver the healthy DNA to individual cells.
Three months after doctors injected patients in the eye with healthy versions of the gene, all three patients could detect dim lights they were unable to see before the treatment.
In the case of one woman, she was using her right eye — initially her worst — to read the dashboard clock for the first time in her life. The researchers found that she was seeing the light using a portion of the eye that had been injected with the healthy DNA, and not the usual spot used for reading and seeing detail.
“She either uses her normal gaze straight ahead or, under other conditions, she switches to this treated area. So she has two loci for gaze and she switches between the two. That took a while to occur,” Cideciyan said.
A year after their treatments, the therapy has not caused an immune response in the eye or in the body, the team said.
The researchers will continue to monitor the patients over several years and are experimenting with other patients to see if injecting different amounts of DNA is more effective.

Are you one of those many youngsters who have been burdened with geeky glasses all your life? Or are you tired of losing those contact lenses every time you try to pop them in your eye? Take heart, for city doctors have now started implanting what are known as permanent contact lenses.
For the many youngsters embarrassed by their thick glasses and the many nerd jokes that continue to plague them, permanent contact lenses might be the perfect solution. These lenses are placed inside the eye, behind the pupil and are very safe.
The lenses are made of a bio-compatible material called Collamer, and is very popular worldwide. In any case it is a reversible procedure, and a patient can always go back to his glasses if he/she wishes. While the procedure has been gaining popularity worldwide, it is best to visit a trained ophthalmologist for the procedure.
In comparison to disposable contact lenses which need to be put every morning and taken out in the evening, this is a permanent lens which is placed inside the eye for natural vision. It is also called high definition vision since the lenses are known to give a better quality of vision.
Laser treatment (also known as Lasik) is generally not suitable for 20 per cent of the glasses users because of their thin corneas. In some contact lens wearers Lasik can also cause dry eyes and permanent contact lenses are the perfect answer for such patients.
What makes permanent contact lenses a safer bet is the fact that this procedure does not have any side effects like dry eyes or blood shot eyes. However, the surgery is prone to minor treatable complications like raised pressures and inflammation. Generally doctors check for the anatomical suitability of the eye i.e., the anterior chamber (space inside the eye) depth should be more than 2.75mm.
The surgery which takes a mere 15-20 minutes is relatively painless. Depending on the type of prescription lens that is used, the operation can cost anywhere between Rs 25,000 to Rs 1 lakh. Post-operatively too, except for regular medication, there is not much caution to be taken. However, patients should avoid rubbing their eyes too hard once the lens have been implanted.