Keeping Your Eyes Strong and Healthy

By Ted Spiker

While you need them to do everything from checking e-mail to obeying stop signs, your eyes rank high on the preciousness priority scale for another reason: Because seeing helps you enjoy life—visually recording your favorite beach scene, your child's smile, or the delectable dishes in this magazine.

Think of your eye as a camera. You point it at an object, focus, and process the information that you collected to form a picture. The information is passed through the outer layers of the eye—the cornea, iris, and lens—before it reaches the retina, which acts as the screen on which the image is projected. From there, the optic nerve uploads the image to your brain.

You can keep your eyes and the system that supports them telescope-strong—as long as you know what steps to take right now to safeguard them.

How your eyes change in time

Each of the elements that make up your eye can show the effects of  aging—you can have changes to the cornea's flexibility, clouding of the lens, or damage to the retina or optic nerves. In some cases the result is a gradual impairment of vision; in others, blindness may occur.

Presbyopia: The first change you may experience is this slight hardening of the cornea, which impairs the eye's ability to focus on items close at hand, says Michael Roizen, MD, a division chair at the Cleveland Clinic and coauthor of YOU: The Owner's Manual. Known as presbyopia, the condition often appears around age 40.

Glaucoma: Caused when there is an imbalance in the production and drainage of fluid in the eye, glaucoma is often a result of high pressure in the eye (although the condition can be hereditary). This, in turn, can cause damage to the eye's optic nerve, which leads to a reduction in peripheral, or side, vision and eventually can lead to blindness. Although glaucoma can occur at any age, those who are over the age of 60 are six times more likely to develop it.

Cataracts: This blur on the lens causes hazy vision and a loss of contrast. Cataracts require treatment; without it, they can worsen to the point where you become legally blind. Age, smoking, damaging UV light, and a buildup of glucose in people with diabetes are all factors known to contribute to cataracts. They usually begin to appear after age 60.

Macular degeneration: The macula is the part of the retina responsible for straight-ahead vision. Fatty deposits called drusen can develop under the retina and may contribute to a loss of important cells needed for vision. Also, abnormal blood vessel growth can lead to bleeding in the eye. The result is age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The condition starts as blurry vision but may eventually lead to a loss of central vision. It has no cure and is the biggest cause of vision loss in people over 60.