Everyone knows how important it is to wear sunscreen, especially if you’re going to be spending the day outside. Sunscreen has become a part of many of our daily routines and is in most skin creams. Enjoying our short summers here in Calgary usually means spending as much time as possible outside while the weather is nice and we all know we need to wear sunscreen when we’re outside all day. Protecting your eyes from the sun though is just as important.

In my last blog I talked about cataracts and how UV light increases your risk of getting cataracts sooner. Several blogs ago I talked about macular degeneration and how one of the main preventable risk factors in the disease is exposure to UV light! If you’ve been reading my blogs you already know how important protecting your eyes from the sun is. UV light also increases your risk of certain eye and eyelid cancers as well as wrinkles, lumpy fleshy elevations on the white of your eye called pingueculae or even fleshy growths over the clear part of your eye called pterygia!

So I’ve convinced you how important sun protection is (I hope!) and you get it now. Even though sun protection is really important did you know that almost one third of people don’t wear sunglasses at all? When we talk about kids that number increases to almost 50%! While it is definitely important for people of all ages to wear sun protection it is extra important for kids. A combination of very large pupils, a more transparent lens inside of their eye that allows far more UV to penetrate inside and spending more time outside than most adults leads to 80% of lifetime UV exposure to the eye to happen before the age of 18!

UV light is sneaky and may be getting to your skin and your eyes in situations you might not expect such as underwater, on cloudy days or getting a double dose from light reflected off of snow or water!

All sunglasses are the same though, right? Wrong. Not all sunglasses block all UV light rays. All sunglasses sold in Canada have some degree of UV protection but not all block 99% of UVB rays which is what is recommended to best protect your eyes! If you have sunglasses and want to know how much UV they block feel free to bring them in to our office and we can measure how much UV is blocked at no cost to you.

So you’re saying to yourself alright, I get it, I need to wear good sunglasses: I have more news. Sunglasses are often not enough. Even nice big sunglasses still let some light in around the edges and especially some of the extremely cool aviator frames are flat (they don't 'wrap' around your face) and don’t offer much protection from the side. You have some options to help protect yourself further. A good hat with a wide brim helps prevent as much sunlight from getting around your sunglasses. Another option though is to wear contacts!

I know you’re wondering how on Earth contact lenses could help. It’s a fair question since most do not. All contact lenses offered by Acuvue though have some degree of UV protection. They have many that will block over 99% of UVB! This is a great option for protecting your eyes from the sun and at Eye Spy Optometry we carry a wide variety of Acuvue products.

So which is best? Sunglasses? A hat? UV blocking contact lenses? The answer is all of them together. All these options will work together to give you comprehensive UV protection for your eyes. It’s important to remember as well that UV exposure doesn’t decrease very much on cloudy days, under water, in the winter or at dawn or dusk. If you think you only need sun protection from 10:00am-4:00pm on sunny days in the summer you’re going to still get a heavy dose of UV the rest of the time! Think about all those times on the ski hill when you’ve ended up with a burn on the few exposed areas of skin you had.

Remember to protect your eyes, protect your skin and protect your health with as many UV blocking options as you can find. Your body will thank you for it!

If you have more questions about this or anything else always feel free to contact us on Twitter, Facebook, Google + or via our website. For more information feel free to follow the links below:

The Vision Care Institute

Doctors of Optometry Canada - Risks Associated with Sun Exposure

Doctors of Optometry Canada - Children and Risks Associated with Sun Exposure

Often when I talk with my patients about cataracts they’re very unclear about what a cataract really is! Lots of people seem to think it’s something affecting the front of the eye and can be peeled off. Others think it can just be lasered off. Others think cataracts only happen in older people. None of these things are strictly true. Cataracts are one of the most common eye disorders in the world and so of course lots of myths have sprung up around them. Let’s figure out what cataracts are, who they affect and what you can do to prevent or treat them.

To fully understand cataracts you need to know a very little bit about the anatomy of the eye. The biggest thing to absorb here is that the pupil, the dark central part of your eye, is not an actual thing. The pupil is actually nothing! It’s just a hole. Behind that hole though is a very cool structure called the crystalline lens. The lens in your eye not only provides some of the focusing ability of your eye so you can see far away it also flexes and changes shape to allow you to see clearly when you look at things that are close to you as well. Overtime that lens can become cloudy. This prevents as much light from getting to your retina and also causes light to scatter. This leads to a combination of blurred vision and night glare. This is a cataract.

This is an example of an extremely dense cataract. They almost never get this bad in Canada as people usually seek treatment before their vision is this bad.

So now that we know what a cataract is, what causes it? There are actually a lot of different causes so today I’ll go over just a few. One of the most important causes of cataracts is exposure to UV light. Over the long term UV light causes the lens inside of our eye to cloud up. Your best protection against this is to wear sunglasses as much as possible when outside, even on cloudy days or as the sun is going up or down. Many people think there is a much lower risk of UV exposure when it’s cloudy or during sunrise or sunset but while the UV exposure is somewhat reduced UV is still getting through to your eyes and skin.

An impact or other types of injury (such as electric shock) can also cause cataracts in otherwise young and healthy people. The trauma to the eye and to the lens can cause the lens itself to rupture or crack. These cracks allow fluid to enter into the rigidly organized lens and allows a cataract to form. The most obvious way to prevent this is to protect yourself against injury! Wear safety glasses if you’re doing work where something might hit you in the eye and definitely while participating in sports like squash that carry a high risk of getting hit in the eye.

The last type of cataract I’ll go over today is congenital. Congenital is fancy word for ‘you’re born with it’. Roughly ⅓ of congenital cataracts are genetic, ⅓ are caused by a disorder or disease and ⅓ are idiopathic… another fancy word that means we don’t really know where they come from. Hospitals do typically check newborns to make sure they don’t have an obvious or significant congenital cataract that requires treatment . That said I have a lot of patients that have minor congenital cataracts that aren’t really an issue but they had no idea were there.

So cataracts are inside the eye and are the clouding of the lens behind our pupil. They can affect anyone from newborns to seniors depending on a lot of different factors. These facts probably fly in the face of what you thought cataracts really were! The good news is that cataracts can be easily removed with a relatively quick and easy surgery. That’s a topic for another blog though! For now, if you have any questions you can always contact us on Twitter, Facebook, Google + or via our website. For more information check out the following links.

Doctors of Optometry Canada - Cataracts

CNIB - Cataracts