Smoking causes vision loss

Emphasizing that smoking causes the development and progression of macular degeneration, which is a very important eye health problem, Öztürk pointed out that it is very important for eye health to stay away from cigarettes as both active and passive smokers.

Öztürk stated that the yellow spot is an area in the retina at the back of the eyes that provides colorful and sharp vision, Öztürk said: “Smoking causes some damage to the yellow spot cells and especially the development of yellow spot disease and its progression .Smoking is an important risk factor for yellow spot disease.If we smoke, we must turn today i.e. May 31 into a very important opportunity for our health and completely and completely eliminate smoking from our lives.For a smoke-free Turkey, our ministry of Public Health has very important studies and projects. Let’s carry our country to a smoke-free future. Let’s leave a healthy future,” he said.

Öztürk pointed out that about 2 million people in Turkey have macular degeneration and an increase in age-related macular degeneration and warned as follows;

“The disease is more common in people over the age of 65, but after age 50 it is a critical period for macular degeneration. There are many symptoms of macular degeneration. These include decreased vision and deterioration, difficulty reading, and wavy or broken vision of the object and the lines of sight. The main risk factors for macular degeneration are the patient’s age and heredity.

Sunlight, smoking, wrong eating habits, high blood pressure are also risk factors. There are dry and wet forms of macular degeneration. In the dry type, which accounts for 85 to 90 percent of the disease, vision loss is usually slow and may revert to the wet type. In the wet type, the loss of central vision is usually rapid and severe. When yellow point function begins to deteriorate, lines break, blurry vision, and darken in the center of the central vision and visual field. Intraocular drug injections are used in the treatment of wet-type macular degeneration and are done every month for the first 3 months, then repeated according to needs and protocols. The goal of treatment is to preserve vision. Photodynamic therapy may be helpful in some specific types of macular degeneration. In retinal diseases, sub-threshold micropulse lasers have recently been used, which are far from the destructive effects of conventional lasers.