Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide, and obviously can't be helped with eyeglasses. In the western world, with good access to surgery, it is usually easily treated and does not lead to permanent blindness. Unfortunately, in the third world, access to the surgery is very limited and so leads to millions of people having permanent blindness.
A cataract is the formation of opacities in the lens in your eye. Your lens sits just behind your pupil and is responsible for changing the focus of your eye when you do any close up work. From the moment you are born, your lens gets slowly harder and harder. This results in less focusing power and you begin to notice this at around the age of forty when you start to need reading glasses.
At around the age of sixty, the lens completely solidifies, resulting in the complete loss of focusing power. The next phase of this process is for the lens to form opacities that block the light entering your eye. This is a cataract.
There are different types of cataracts and they all have different effects on your vision. I will briefly discuss these different types below.
A common type is a posterior sub capsular cataract. As the name suggests, it is found at the back of the lens. This type of cataract need not be very large before it causes vision loss. This is because it is usually directly in front of your central vision and so becomes very noticeable. This type of cataract is sometimes associated with the use of steroids.
Nuclear cataracts are a general hardening and yellowing of the lens. This can cause an increase in shortsightedness. This results in a need to regularly change your eyeglasses. Some people will notice this change when they suddenly don't need their reading specs any longer.
Cortical cataract is another common form. It appears as spoke like wedges in the peripheral lens. This doesn't cause a great loss of detailed vision until quite advanced, but does cause a lot of glare problems, especially when driving.
The treatment for cataract is surgery. It is only local anaesthetic surgery and the procedure usually takes only 20 minutes. It is low risk, but there is a risk. Around 2 in 100 people end up with worse vision than they started with and around 1 in 1000 will lose sight altogether.
Cataracts are a natural part of the aging process and will affect everyone if we live long enough. There is very little that can be done to prevent them, however, the use of UV protecting sunglasses throughout the whole of your life may delay them. Spectacles don't need to be designer ones. As long as they have the ce mark, they should have UV protection.
Craig Leaver is a profesisonal optician and owner of http://www.myeyeglasses.co.uk/ an online shop for designer glasses and Eyeglasses.
Craigs deication to caring for his patients visual health and their pocked drives him on his daily quest for caring quality.
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