Eye Exams Help Identify Chronic Health Conditions

Our eyes are often the truest indicators of health

A quick glance at someone’s eyes can reveal their mood, stress level, and whether or not they got enough sleep last night! But this goes much, much deeper. When your Vision Source® doctor takes a closer look at your eyes, he or she can detect early warning signs for a host of serious and chronic conditions. Diabetes, hypertension, and other diseases leave telltale markers in our eyes, and vision care professionals are often the first to notice them. When a routine eye exam leads to early disease detection, it can help patients prevent serious conditions from progressing, and in some cases even save a life.

Eye Exams Can Reveal Common “Silent Killers”

Some of the biggest health concerns we face today are “silent killer” diseases—conditions that progress slowly over time, without easily recognizable symptoms in the early stages. Many recent studies have identified some that are frequently found first by vision care professionals, including:

• Diabetes: in its early stages, small blood vessels in the eye can swell and leak.
• Hypertension (high blood pressure): blood vessels can narrow, bend, or change color.
• High cholesterol: fatty deposits in the eyes and plaque in retinal blood vessels are telltale signs.

There are many other diseases that can be caught early by a routine eye exam, including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and cancer. Regardless of the condition, the sooner it is detected and diagnosed, the better chance a patient has to reduce its impact.

Take Charge of Your Health With an Eye Exam

Our Vision Source® optometrists will help you inform your primary care physician of any health issues found during your eye exam.  Our mission goes further than just providing glasses and contacts for vision correction—we want to be your lifelong partners in health. Together, we’ll help you establish habits that will protect your eyes and your entire body.

Thanks for reading our blog! We are glad to provide you with the very best, highly personalized vision care.

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Top image by Flickr user Petras Gagilas used under Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license. Image cropped and modified from original.