More than 1 million people in the US and more than 40 million people worldwide have bilateral blindness-visual acuity less than 20/200 and 3 to 5 times that number have significantly impaired vision.
20 times more frequent in diabetics than others.
Diabetic retinopathy, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration of the major causes of vision loss and blindness.
Women have a higher prevalence of vision loss than men.
The most common causes of blindness worldwide are cataracts, glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, infections, and ischemia how long the visual pathways, trauma, and parasitic diseases:for most cases there are no therapies to restore vision.
Most cases of irreversible blindness, entail the loss of specific retinal neurons have failed to regenerate or in cases of severe trauma, loss of the whole retina, optic nerve, or eye itself.
Acute visual loss of one eye requires urgent evaluation and management.
In an acute visual loss of one eye it is critical to identify where the visual loss is due to a lesion in the eye, especially the retina, or the optic nerve.
A retinal lesion is suggested bye a wavy or warped image, flashing or colored lights, or a sudden increase in floaters.
Color desaturation is a frequent symptom with optic nerve lesions.
Timing of visual loss is key to diagnosis of acute monocular visual loss, with optic neuritis it involves quickly and then subsequently improves, while with ischemic optic neuropathy it is sudden and static and with compressive lesions its discovery may be sudden, but its occurrence will likely be Insidious and slowly Progressive.
In acute monocular visual loss the presence or absence of pain is important to establish the correct diagnosis;pain is typically present in disorders such as optic neuritis or giant cell arteritis but absent in non arteritic ischemic optic neuropathy.
A dilated fundus exam must be performed to diagnose conditions such as retinal or vitreous detachment, arterial or venous occlusion, or other retinal pathology.
Occlusion of the central retinal artery is characterized by diffuse retinal whitening with a macular ch2242y red spot.
Diabetic macular ischemia often produces macular edema associated with retinal hemorrhages and cotton wool spots.
A retinal vein occlusion produces profuse intraretinal hemorrhages.
MRI of the orbit is often the most helpful diagnostic tests and suspected optic nerve disorders and can distinguish between inflammatory, ischemic, and neoplastic causes.