Eye Examinations For Sight and Wisdom

With age comes wisdom many say but also sometimes health problems.  As we grow older and celebrate birthdays each year our bodies react in various ways as our knees start to complain with pain going up a set of stairs, wrinkles appear on our faces from extended sun exposure of years past, and our eye sight weakens requiring us to wear reading glasses or other glasses and lenses to see.

Eye doctors tell us our eye sight dramatically changes with increasing age but that these changes don’t have to be life altering.  This is good news because we are only growing (or able) to grow older unless you are Benjamin Button of course from “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with the problem of growing younger.  Sigh…but back to reality.

With proper care, vigilance, and effort eye doctors say vision impairments associated with age can be drastically minimized or even completely prevented.  As I was doing my homework on aging and eye care (something I take very seriously as my grandfather has AMD and cannot live a fully-independent life) I read a Special Report Vision from the Mayo Clinic.

This report describes the top issues older adults face with their vision according to many eye care doctors like Dr. Tavel and his associates.  These issues are as follows:

-Presbyopia occurs for many adults after age 40; lens in the eye is less flexible making it difficult to focus on close objects and quickly between near and far

-Dry eyes occur with age as tear production and quality decrease

–Cataracts is the clouding of the lens in your eye as our lenses become stiffer with age and proteins clump together hindering vision

–Glaucoma is damage to our optic nerve mostly associated with abnormally high pressure in the eye due to lack of drainage

–Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) occurs for most adults after age 50 with gradual loss of central vision with the deterioration (from age) of the macula

These aging eye dilemmas each have multiple courses of action associated with their care and prevention.  But overwhelmingly the best eye doctors say that a yearly eye examination is the key to helping to save vision and prevent impairments such as these.  Eye care doctors like the Indianapolis eye doctors I visit with at Dr. Tavel can detect vision problems through tests performed at a yearly eye examination.  It is this kind of care that can save your vision as you age so that along with all of your worldly wisdom you too can have your sight.