If your eyes are feeling dry, irritated, tired, and out of focus right now, you aren't alone.

These symptoms, along with head, neck, and back pain, afflict people who suffer from a malaise unique to our modern era: "digital eye strain." Nearly 90% of Americans are at risk for this issue, and more than 65% experience it, according to areport released January 6 by The Vision Council, an industry group.

The culprit for these eye issues — uncomfortable in the short term and potentially dangerous in the long term — is the amount of time we all spend staring at screens and the effect that the blue light those screens emit has on our eyes.

It doesn't take that much time to start causing these problems either. More than two hours in front of a screen can lead to eye-strain issues.

The Vision Council surveyed 10,329 representative US residents to see how much time we spend in front of screens and how it affects us. They found that we stare at screens all the time.

Source : http://www.techinsider.io/how-staring-at-a-screen-hurts-your-eyes-2016-6

Visit an eye care practitioner regularly.

These are trained professionals who specialize in looking after the health of your eyes. They can be ophthalmologists (eye doctors) or optometrists. To keep your eyes in good health, have your eyes checked regularly or when you are having problems with your vision. Learn more about your eyes and ask your eye doctor questions when you have them. Learning more about your eyes and how to prevent eye diseases will help you to feel more in control of your health.

• If you don't have any vision problems, you should visit an eye care practitioner every 5-10 years during your 20s and 30s.
• If you don't have any vision problems, you should visit an eye care practitioner every 2-4 years between the ages of 40 and 65.
• If you don't have any vision problems, you should visit an eye care practitioner every 1-2 years after the age of 65.

Source : http://www.wikihow.com/Take-Care-of-Your-Eyes#Eating_for_Good_Eye_Health_sub

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 Headaches, dry eyes, blurred or double vision - all of these symptoms are a result of looking at a computer or cell phone screens all day long. It’s called digital eye strain.

"Digital Eye Strain is a collective term to describe symptoms that people have after they work on the computer for a long period of time. When we look at the computer our eye blinks less. We only blink about 30% of the normal rate. And convergence of the eye muscle becomes so tired [that] some people report seeing double, feeling very tired, or you cannot focus or concentrate," Dr. Pang says.

And, with the recent Pokemon Go craze, Dr. Pang suggests more people might be susceptible to it.

"When you are talking about using any type of computer game, any type of phone game, not only are you exposed to the same problems from earlier, but you're also exposed to conditions such as the High Energy Visible Blue Light (HEV Light)."

According to Dr. Pang HEV Light, which is the light commonly associated with cell phone screens, penetrates directly into the eye, which can eventually cause damage to the eye’s photoreceptors.

"When you're running around chasing all the Pokemon monsters the problem is you do not know you are actually doing damage to your eye," Pang says.

And some phones, like the iPhone, have a night shift feature which browns the screen, reducing harmful blue light. Dr. Pang recommends his patients have this feature turned on all the time. Whether computer screens are ultimately to blame for poor vision in our current hyper-digital world Dr. Pang says, "Ever since the computer revolution...we can see there's a drastic increase in nearsightedness."

In order to avoid digital eye strain, he says to, "Take breaks. At least every hour stand up, look at something far away. You relax your eyes looking far away. And, also, you can force blink your eyes seven times, consecutively, and then your natural tears will come out."

Dr. Pang also says nutrition is important to good eye health. He recommends eating more beta-carotene from carrots or lutein from leafy greens. There are also glasses that are made to reduce HEV light if you game a lot or are on the computer on a daily basis.

Source : http://eyeopenertv.com/2016/07/21/pokemon-go-may-be-hurting-your-eyes/

An eye doctor says he’s recently seen a few 35-year-old patients whose lenses, which are typically clear all the way up until around age 40, are so cloudy they resemble 75-year-olds’. A sleep doctor says kids as young as toddlers are suffering from chronic insomnia, which in turn affects their behavior and performance at school and daycare. A scientist finds that women who work night shifts are twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those who sleep at night.

What do all these anecdotes have in common? Nighttime exposure to the blue light emanating from our screens.


You’ve probably heard the hype these past few years: being in the presence of light at night disrupts the body’s natural circadian rhythms by suppressing the production of melatonin, a sleep hormone. But melatonin does far more than help us get sleepy – it’s also an antioxidant that appears to play a pivotal role in slowing the progression of cancer and other diseases.

“I’ve been spending a lot of the past 20 years worrying about it,” said Dr. Richard Hansler, who clocked in 42 years at GE Lighting developing “all kinds of bright, beautiful lights” before his move to John Carroll University in Ohio, where he studied the effects of light at night on our health. It was the mid 1990s, and at that point, he said, his concern wasn’t widely shared.

“I discovered that using light at night is bad for people’s health and interferes with their sleep. I felt a moral obligation to do something about it, particularly when I learned it’s the blue component in ordinary white light that is suppressing the production of melatonin. And melatonin not only helps you sleep but is a marvelous material that has a very big influence on health in general; specifically, if you don’t have enough you may develop diabetes, obesity, heart disease, and even a couple kinds of cancer.”

When the stars go blue

The impact of blue light on melatonin production was only recently confirmed, in 2001, when scientists found that light in the blue spectrum — the 415 to 445 nanometer range — disrupts melatonin. Because it is so bright, blue light is used widely in pretty much all LED devices, including phones, tablets, laptops, and TVs. And because it is so hot, it appears to be wreaking all sorts of havoc on our eyes, on melatonin, and consequently, on our health.

The latest research, in fact, overwhelmingly suggests that delayed production of melatonin due to blue light exposure at night is causing far more problems than insomnia, from diabetes and certain types of cancer to lupus and migraine headaches. Optometrists are even seeing high levels of retinal stress in young people that could lead to the early onset of macular degeneration, which in extreme cases can cause near blindness.

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“Here’s what doesn’t need research: 415 to 445nm is super hot light, and if it’s really focused and brought up close – when you’re talking about a tablet six inches from a kid’s face – it’s got to be significant,” said Dr. William Harrison, a renowned optometrist in Laguna Beach, Calif., who has been following the research on blue light closely for the past year. He said the research is compelling, but that the medical profession is slow to catch on to the concerns.

Because artificial light at night has only been around for the past century or so, and the hotter, brighter blue light has only been so heavily concentrated in our light sources for the past 10 or 20 years (the previously popular incandescent bulbs don’t emit the same amount of blue light, which is stronger in CFLs but stronger still in LEDs), its long-term effect on our eyes and bodies remains unknown.

Screening for problems
For those who like to read the scientific literature directly, here’s a quick tour of some of the latest findings, and a search on blue light and melatonin via the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed search tool can yield larger results:

Room light not only suppresses melatonin production, but it could also impact sleep, thermoregulation, blood pressure and glucose homeostasis
Blue light is considered a “carcinogenic pollution” that in mice correlates with higher cancer rates
A lack of melatonin is linked to higher rates of breast, ovarian, and prostate cancers, while blocking those blue rays with amber glasses is linked to lower cancer rates
Exposure to blue light in people appears to have an impact on mood
Lower melatonin in mice is linked with higher rates of depression
Too much light exposure can cause retinal toxicity
Blue light exposure may be playing a role in the higher incidence of cataracts and macular degeneration seen today
The more Hansler conducted his own investigation into the impact of blue light on various aspects of human and animal health, the more he felt he had an obligation to do something. In 2005, he and a group of physicists at John Carroll University developed light bulbs that don’t emit blue light and goggles that block out that part of the spectrum, and he has since written a handful of books on the subject. (If you’re doing the math, yes, Hansler is now 90 years old and no, he hasn’t yet retired.)

A few developers of goggles and glasses that block blue light exist now, including Lighting Science out of Florida. In fact Dr. Michael Breus, the “Sleep Doctor” who regularly appears on shows like Dr. Oz, is so convinced by the science that he’s bought Lighting Science’s Good Night Bulb (with low levels of blue light) for his bedroom and the Awake & Alert Bulb (with more blue light to energize in the mornings) for his bathroom. Astronauts even use the bulbs to help regulate their sleep cycles on the International Space Station, which orbits the Earth every 90 minutes.

It remains unclear whether our screens themselves will soon emit less blue light — Hansler is pessimistic because he says that changing the amoung of blue light will be like admitting that the screens are causing health problems, and lawsuits could ensue. For now, there are screens for tablets that purport to filter out the blue light, and as well as apps that let you put your device in a bedtime mode where the light contains less blues and more ambers. Hansler is suspicious of whether those screens and apps work, and wants more research done.

In the meantime, does this mean we all need to refrain from any TV or lighting at all in a bedroom in the hour or two prior to bedtime, in a room so dark you can’t see your hand in front of you? “I think that’s crap,” Dr. Breus says. “If I told everybody to put themselves into a pitch dark room at 8 at night at 68 degrees with no noise, would people sleep better? Maybe. But you have to have a fairly decent amount of light and in close proximity.”

Source : https://gigaom.com/2014/09/01/what-is-the-blue-light-from-our-screens-really-doing-to-our-eyes/
Featured photo courtesy Shutterstock user kryzhov.