EYE CONDITIONS, DISEASES, DISORDERS, INFECTIONS Flashcards
Haemolacria
Tears of blood - A symptom not a disease
Causes include:
- Blood vessels that don’t grow the right way
-Tumours
-Inflamed tissues
-Bacterial or viral infections
More common in children and teens. Treatment depends on the cause.
Polycoria
Having more than one working pupil in a single eye
- May be linked to conditions like glaucoma and cataracts
- Not everyone needs treatment, but surgery can restore dimmed vision.
Heterochromia
Having a different colour irises from one another. Or one iris might contain different colours
- When born with it, you probably won’t have other symptoms or need treatment
- Sometimes a sign of a rare condition inherited from parents at birth
- Can be caused by an injury or disease later in life.
Cat Eye Syndrome
‘Coloboma’
- A disease can cause a notch or gap in parts of the eyes
- Affects the iris or pupil, and the eye might look like a cat’s
- Colobomas can also appear in other organs and body parts. Most of the time they come from a problem in the genes that resut in changes during development and show up at birth
- May need a team of doctors to manage the different symptoms
Optic Neuritis
- Inflammation that damages the optic nerve
- Typically begins with eye pain, especially with eye movements, blurry vision, flashing lights, colours especially red, might be less bright.
- Within a few days, progresses into blurred vision in the affected eye, often this appearing like a “thumb-print” or smudge that blurs the vision
- Within a week, may progress to darkening of part of the visual field
- May be caused by infection
- Often the first sign of MS, a progressive, neurologic disorder
- About 50% of people who have MS will develop optic neuritis
- Can strike anywhere between ages 20 and 40
- Usually affects one eye; could lose vision for a few hours/days/months, or lose a portion of the peripheral vision
- Steroids for pain: eyesight should be back to normal within a year, but the condition can return.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS)
Visual hallucinations caused by the brain’s adjustment to significant vision loss.
- Often linked to ARMD or cataracts
Ocular Albinism
Genetic condition that primarily affects the eyes. This condition reduces the coloring (pigmentation) of the iris, which is the colored part of the eye, and the retina , which is the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eye. Pigmentation in the eye is essential for normal vision
Your iris absorbs light. Your retina, at the back of your eye, processes it. If you don’t have enough of the pigment that gives them their color, the nerves that help you see could get damaged. That can lead to:
Blurry vision
Eyes that look in different directions
Light sensitivity
Trouble judging distance
There’s no cure, but your doctor can help you manage your symptoms.
Traumatic Cataract
Traumatic cataract is clouding of the lens and eyes that may occur after either blunt or penetrating ocular trauma that disrupts and damages the lens fibers. Most of the traumatic cataracts lead to eye lens swelling, but the type and clinical course depends on trauma and the integrity of the capsular bag.
Your lens helps focus light and images onto your retina. It may take a while, but if it gets hit or pierced, or jostled around, a cataract can form. It will look cloudy and may be star-shaped. The doctor may give you corticosteroids, which help with swelling and pain from the injury but can sometimes make the cataract worse over time
Chronic Progressive External Ophthalmoplegia (CPEO)
Disorder characterized by slowly progressive paralysis of the extraocular muscles
the most common disease of mitochondrial myopathies, which is clinically characterized by bilateral ptosis, limitation of eye movements, and sometimes with limb and bulbar muscle involvement
You can inherit genes that cause the muscles in and around your eye to get weak or stop working. It could start anywhere from age 18 to 40. It can affect one or both eyes. You may find it hard to swallow or you might feel that muscles all over your body are weak, especially after you exercise. There’s no cure, but surgery can correct droopy eyelids and other symptoms
Anisocoria
A condition characterized by an unequal size of the eyes’ pupils
- Causes:
•Physical injury from ocular trauma or surgery
•Inflammatory conditions such as uveitis, angle closure glaucoma
•Intraocular tumors causing physical distortion of the iris
- Affecting up to 20% of the population, often entirely harmless, but can be a sign of more serious medical problems
Horner Syndrome
‘Oculosympathetic Palsy ‘
Rare neurological syndrome affecting the eye and the surrounding area on one side of the face
- A sign of underlying nerve damage
- Possible causes: carotid artery dissection, apical lung tumor
Retinoblastoma
A rare form of cancer, a malignant tumor of the developing retina that occurs in children, usually before age five years
- May occur in one or both eyes
- Signs:
• A white color in the center circle of the eye (pupil) when light is shone in the eye, such as when someone takes a flash photograph of the child
• Eyes that appear to be looking in different directions
•Poor vision
•Eye redness
•Eye swelling
Retinitis pigmentosa (RP)
A group of eye problems that affect the retina. This condition changes how the retina responds to light, making it hard to see
- RP makes cells in the retina break down slowly over time, causing vision loss
- Inherited
- Early symptoms
• Loss of night vision — usually starting in childhood
• Sensitivity to bright light
• Loss of color vision
• Loss of peripheral vision
• Eventual loss of central vision
- Causes:
• Usher syndrome: causes both vision and hearing loss
• Some medications
• Infections
• Eye injury
Microphthalmia
- Small eye syndrome
- A rare developmental disorder of the eye in which one or both eyes are abnormally small
- May occur as an isolated entity but is commonly associated with other ocular or systemic findings as part of a syndrome
- Can be caused by a change in genes or chromosomes
- Can also be caused by taking certain medicines, like isotretinoin (Accutane®) or thalidomide, during pregnancy.
Bietti’s Crystalline Dystrophy (BCD)
A rare genetic disease: crystals made of fatty acids build up in the cornea and retina
- First symptoms start in the teens or twenties
- Symptoms:
• Blurry or hazy vision
• Trouble seeing in low light
• Not being able to see things in the peripheral vision
• Trouble seeing certain colors
- Condition affects both eyes but one eye may get worse more quickly than the other
- Eventually results in legal blindness: can still see things in the center of their vision, but this vision is often blurry
Risks:
- Genetic
- East Asian
