Reflected light causes maculopathy
Everyone knows that you shouldn’t look at the sun with your naked eye if you don’t want to harm your eye health. However, there is a case report that looking at electronic devices such as cell phones in the sun can cause the same harm to the eyes.
According to a research team at the University Hospital in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, two patients suffered severe retinal damage from strong reflections from the sun. Because neither of them looked directly at the sun, the researchers concluded that the glare reflected from the electronics was the cause.
The patients were a male in their 30s and a female in their 20s. The man looked at the tablet on the ski center terrace for 4 hours and developed symptoms such as distorted vision and difficulty seeing distant objects. The woman looked at her cell phone for 3 hours on the beach and developed a scotomas. The scotoma is where the nerve fibers that make up each nerve converge in the retina. It looks like a red or white disk, but because there are no visual cells in this area, it does not respond to light.
Men developed bilateral degeneration, a visual defect that causes straight lines to appear rounded. Also, a central scotoma appeared, making it difficult to see distant objects. He spent four hours reading on his tablet PC outdoors during a ski vacation two days ago.
For women, they spent three hours on a cell phone on a sunny beach. A small yellow lesion appeared in this woman. There were also dot-shaped scars in the outer stratum corneum and light-absorbing photoreceptor layers of the retina, which are essential for spatial perception.
A team of researchers led by Dr Joaquin Marticolena confirmed that both people developed solar macular degeneration. The research team said, “The reflection of sunlight from electronic devices should be considered as a risk factor for solar maculopathy.
This study report (Solar maculopathy secondary to sunlight exposure reflected from the screen of mobile devices: two case reports) was published in the Journal of Medical Case Reports.
By Kwon Soon-il, staff reporter kstt77@kormedi.com
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