What Your Eyes Say About Your Health

The purpose of our company, Natural Eye Care, is to help people learn about the connection between healthy vision and overall health (which includes diet, lifestyle, emotions and genetics), as well as to educate the public as to actions they can take to protect one's precious gift of sight.

To demonstrate the relationship to eye health and overall health, the following are diseases that can be often be observed first through the eyes: diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, cardiovascular disease which includes aneurisms, HIV, cancer and rare hereditary diseases.

Your eyes can tell you about your health. Here are some visual signs that can be seen by the naked eye:

• Bloody eye (also known as a "subconjunctival hemorrhage") if not caused by trauma, may be a sign of extreme high blood pressure or a platelet disorder.
• Bulging eyes may be evidence of a Thyroid disease such as "Graves Disease".
• Different colored eyes (also called heterochromia iridis which is usually inherited). A change in color may be due to bleeding, a foreign body in the eye, glaucoma, inflammation in the eye or other conditions such as Waardenburg syndrome or neurofibromatosis.
• Droopy eyelid (Ptosis) is usually a normal sign of aging. But in rare cases it is evidence of a brain tumor or a neuromuscular disease known as myasthenia gravis (MG).
• Pupil abnormalities - pupils are usually symmetrical. If one pupil is bigger than the other, or if one pupil shrinks less, or more slowly, on exposure to light, there could be an underlying medical problem. Possibilities include stroke, brain or optic nerve tumor, brain aneurysm, syphilis, and multiple sclerosis (MS). Finally, many medications -- including illicit drugs -- can cause the pupils to appear unusually small or large, says Peter Kastl, MD, PhD, professor of ophthalmology, Tulane University School of Medicine.
• Rings on the Cornea may indicate a rare disease called "Wilson's Disease" which can be the result of a build-up of copper in various tissues including the brain and liver.
• Yellow eyes - Diseases of the liver, including hepatitis and cirrhosis, can turn the scleras yellow. The color is caused by the buildup of bilirubin, a compound created by the breakdown of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying molecule inside red blood cells. The medical term for yellow eyes is scleral icterus -- even though it’s not actually the scleras that turn yellow, but the conjunctiva.

Source: WebMD