Night Blindness - Treatment, Symptoms, Diagnosis

2024 Author: Rachel Wainwright | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 07:39

Night blindness

Night blindness, or hemeralopia, is a violation of the mechanism of adaptation of vision to conditions of low light. A person suffering from night blindness has poor vision at twilight or in complete darkness.

Causes of the disease night blindness

The disease can be congenital, symptomatic or essential.

The most common type of disease is essential night blindness. The disease develops against the background of malnutrition and, first of all, due to a lack of vitamin A. This type of night blindness can be caused by liver disease, anemia, or severe depletion of the body. Treatment with vitamin A antagonist drugs, such as quinine, can also provoke the disease.

Congenital night blindness manifests itself in early childhood and is triggered by genetic factors.

Symptomatic night blindness is caused by organic eye diseases: glaucoma, high myopia, or pigmentary pathologies of the retina.

Regardless of the etiology of night blindness, the same reason leads to deterioration of vision in the dark - disturbances in the formation of rhodopsin pigment in the optic rods of the retina.

Symptoms of the disease night blindness

With night blindness and a lack of vitamin A in the body, the patient has a progressive decrease in vision in the dark and a decrease in the sensitivity of the retina to bright light. At the same time, the patient develops a decrease in color perception. The correct perception of blue often suffers. Symptoms of night blindness also include the presence of spots in the patient's field of vision while moving from a dark room to a light one.

Diagnostics of the disease night blindness

The diagnosis of "night blindness" is established by an ophthalmologist based on patient complaints, clinical symptoms of the disease, as well as electroretinography data, which allows to establish retinal abnormalities.

Night blindness treatment

The standard of treatment for essential night blindness is diet therapy. The lack of vitamins in night blindness is compensated by a balanced high-calorie diet, which certainly includes:

• Cod liver,
• butter,
• milk,
• cheese,
• eggs,
• fruits and berries (blackberries, black currants, blueberries, peaches, gooseberries, cherries, apricots, mountain ash),
• vegetables and herbs (carrots, tomatoes, spinach, lettuce, green peas)
• and other foods rich in vitamin A.

Diet therapy is also used in the treatment of congenital night blindness. However, the prognosis of treatment is poor. Nutrition rich in vitamins with congenital night blindness only slightly affects the quality of the patient's vision in the dark or twilight. He still has significant visual field narrowing in low light conditions.

The prognosis for the treatment of symptomatic night blindness depends on the severity of the underlying disease. Surgical correction of myopia or timely treatment of glaucoma allows, as a rule, to return the patient to high-quality vision and spatial orientation in the dark.

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The information is generalized and provided for informational purposes only. At the first sign of illness, see your doctor. Self-medication is hazardous to health!