Guest Post: Recognizing Early Symptoms of Degenerative Eye Diseases
Faded Colors – If colors seem to be diminishing or are not distinguishable you could be experiencing early symptoms of a cataract, macular degeneration, or another eye disease. It is important to get this treated quickly. Nearly every case of color blindness that is not genetically inherited is caused by the severe onset of another eye diseases.
Double Vision – Seeing double of an object is a commonly reported sign of macular degeneration, astigmatism, glaucoma, and a few others. It is important to diagnose this early on because, depending on the disease, it might be easily treated. In the case of astigmatism people might mistake it as genuine double vision when in reality astigmatism is defined as two perpendicular planes with different foci. In other words it’s like looking at your TV screen through an odd-shaped glass-it looks blurry or ghosted.
Visual Hallucinations – This is one of the surest signs of macular degeneration which is the leading cause of blindness in Americans 65 or older. Visual hallucinations may randomly appear as spots of color rather than objects. It is a sign of excess pigment in the macula or severe thinning of macular tissues. Our macular tissues tend to thin out as we age but not everyone experiences noticeable problems early on, making it a more difficult disease to spot.
Shadowy Spots in Vision Dark lines or spots in vision can come and go as we get older and too many people label them as harmless or just something that happens as you get older. This is not the case as these spots are usually a sign of optic nerve disease, glaucoma, macular degeneration, or another harmful eye affliction. If these spots start to make a noticeably regular appearance in your vision see the doctor immediately.
As caregivers it is the responsibility of you to look after your patient or loved one because all too often they try too hard not to be an inconvenience. As mentioned above eye diseases can very hard to spot early on so it is important to constantly ask the patients how things are looking.
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