What should I eat to prevent cataracts?
In the ophthalmology ward, the most common surgery is cataract surgery. Many elderly people come for surgery and ask their companions and friends to help them see if they have cataracts, and the most frequently asked question is “What can I eat to avoid cataracts?” The harsh truth is: you can get cataracts no matter what you eat! Cataracts are divided into many types depending on the cause, among which senile cataracts are a natural process of human aging and are inevitable. As with graying hair, although the age of graying is different for everyone, sooner or later it is going to be white.
Why do you get senile cataracts?
If we compare our eyes to a camera, then the lens is the camera’s lens, which plays the function of adjusting the focus. When the lens is cloudy and vision is diminished due to various reasons such as congenital defects, metabolic diseases, injury or natural aging, we call it a cataract. The incidence of senile cataracts is 60%-70% among 50-60 year olds, while about 80% of people over 70 years old have lens clouding.
There are many factors affecting senile cataract, including metabolic decline caused by physiological aging, long-term regulatory tension, vascular sclerosis, malnutrition, ultraviolet radiation damage, and endocrine disorders, all of which can cause physiological changes in the lens, which cannot maintain its normal shape and lose its transparency and gradually clouding.
What are the symptoms of senile cataract?
The main symptom of senile cataract is vision loss and eye fatigue. However, the degree of vision loss sometimes does not correspond exactly to the degree of lens clouding. This is because the area of the lens that is clouded has a greater impact on vision. The lens is largely composed of the nucleus, the cortex, and an outer layer of the capsule. The posterior subcapsular clouding has the greatest impact on vision, especially in the center where vision loss occurs early, while peripheral cortical clouding is virtually asymptomatic. Early nuclear opacities can produce myopia due to increased refractive index in the nucleus. Some elderly people may find that they are reading newspapers more and more clearly, and even no longer need presbyopic glasses, don’t be too happy, this is not a return to old age, but a cataract getting heavier.
In addition to vision loss, some elderly patients also have photophobia and diplopia. One patient once said that the curved moon became a string of moons when he looked up. A few elderly people (especially those who are farsighted) may have secondary glaucoma caused by the lens cortex during the expansion period, with elevated intraocular pressure, sudden eye swelling, headache, nausea and vomiting. (Don’t say it’s hard to register and delay to see, this can be directly registered as an emergency number at any time).
Most older adults have a cloudy lens that weakens the light entering the eye and require a brighter place to see. However, some people with cataracts have trouble seeing in bright places instead, and have to go to places with less light to see. This is because the pupil narrows when the light is particularly bright, and the cloudy area, if it is right in the center, is blocked tightly. In the dark, the pupil expands, and you can see things from the periphery where there is no cloudiness.
Some elderly people do not have a significant loss of vision on physical examination, but they clearly feel that the quality of vision in their daily lives is not as good as it used to be. This is when a contrast sensitivity test may be able to detect the problem. This is because clouding of the lens has caused a decrease in contrast sensitivity vision even though it has not yet affected regular vision exams. It is like looking at a flower in the fog. Although you can still tell what the flower looks like, it is not as bright as it is on a clear day.
It is important to note that elderly people who feel that they cannot see clearly are not always suffering from cataracts, but may simply have a reduced ability to adjust their vision, which is commonly known as “presbyopia”, making it more and more difficult to read newspapers and even television. But as long as you go to the hospital for an eye exam and get a pair of proper glasses, you can solve the problem. There are also some serious eye diseases, such as macular degeneration, retinal detachment, acute glaucoma attack, etc., which may suddenly cause blurred vision, so the elderly can not take it for granted that it is presbyopia or cataract, but should go to the hospital in time to avoid delaying treatment.
Besides senile cataract, are there other types of cataracts?
In addition to the most common age-related cataracts, there are many other causes of cataracts.
1. Congenital cataract: It can be caused by abnormal lens development due to hereditary genes or damage during embryonic development, such as nutritional or metabolic disorders during the mother’s pregnancy, viral infections in early pregnancy, alcohol abuse, and receiving excessive X-rays, which may cause fetal lens clouding.
2. Complicated cataract: Lens clouding caused by other pathologies of the eye becomes complicated cataract. For example, iridocyclitis, high myopia, glaucoma, etc. may cause local circulatory disorders in the eye resulting in abnormal lens metabolism.
3.Secondary cataract: The lens clouding caused by systemic diseases is called secondary cataract. Any acute infectious diseases such as typhoid fever, or wasting diseases such as anemia and nephritis, or even long-term malnutrition can cause secondary cataracts. Among the people with secondary cataracts, the more common ones are: diabetic patients, patients with hand-foot convulsions and patients with ankylosing myasthenia gravis.
What should I do if I have an age-related cataract?
There are many drugs used for cataracts in the market, mainly the following categories.
1.Auxiliary nutritional drugs (such as vitamins B, C and E, carotenoids, etc.)
2.Drugs related to quinone doctrine (e.g. Catalin, Cataract Stop, etc.)
3.Antioxidation damage drugs (such as glutathione, taurine, etc.)
4, aldose reductase inhibitors (such as cabergoline Catalin, Phacolysion, etc.)
5, Chinese herbal medicine (such as Qiju Dihuang Wan or Dendrobium Night Light Pill, etc.). However, all medications cannot cure or stop the development of cataracts, but can only slow down the rate of progression of lens clouding.
Cataracts can only be treated by surgery in the end. In the past, surgery was mostly performed by “cataract extracapsular extraction”, which required a large incision and a long operation time, and the timing of the operation required the cataract to be “ripe” before it could be done, and the nucleus of the lens had to be hardened before a large incision could be made. However, with the development of ultrasound emulsification technology, cataract surgery has been advanced and “cataract ultrasound emulsification” has been carried out in more and more hospitals in recent years. This new surgical procedure allows for smaller and smaller incisions that close on their own without stitches. Since the nucleus of the lens needs to be broken by ultrasound energy, if the cataract is too long and the nucleus is too hard, it may be impossible to break the nucleus by ultrasound or it needs a lot of energy to break the nucleus. Therefore, the timing of cataract surgery can be advanced nowadays, so you don’t need to wait until you can’t see and then have surgery.
Cataract surgery is simple and effective?
Many people think that cataract surgery is a minor operation that takes 20 minutes to complete. In fact, cataract surgery is definitely a technical task, not simple at all. As the saying goes: 10 minutes on the stage, 10 years of work under the stage. Most patients see immediate results after surgery, and their vision is better than when they were young (because cataract surgery can solve the problem of myopia as well), but there are risks associated with surgery, once the post-operative infection and endophthalmitis, the eye may have to be removed, and it is good to keep the eye, and the vision is almost zero. Of course, the probability of endophthalmitis is very small, there is a possibility of derailment in a moving train, so don’t be too nervous when you need surgery, there is a time when you are meant to have it, there is no time when you are meant to have it.
Many elderly people complain after surgery that their neighbors can see everything after cataracts, but why is my vision still bad? The eye is a whole, and it is not only the lens, but also the cornea, the retina, the vitreous humor and so on that are needed to see. Just like a camera, the lens is broken we can replace a new one, but if the film is also bad, then how to change the lens can not take good pictures. Therefore, if the eye has other eye diseases besides lens clouding, especially retinal disease, even with a new lens, the vision will not be improved to normal. And it is especially unfortunate that the retina located behind the lens may not be observable before surgery due to the obscuration of the cloudy lens, and even if the form is vaguely visible, it is difficult to accurately assess its function. Older adults may have concomitant age-related macular degeneration, which is often not detected until after cataract surgery. Nowadays, more and more elderly people are suffering from diabetes and hypertension, which may lead to retinopathy and affect their vision.
What should elderly people pay attention to?
First, avoid stimulation to prevent aging, such as ultraviolet, infrared, sunlight, etc. You can wear sunglasses for outdoor activities under strong light. Secondly, people are a whole, a major illness will affect all organs. Maintaining a healthy body, preventing and controlling diabetes, renal insufficiency, severe diarrhea, etc., is also of great benefit to protect the eyes. Finally, it is medicine that is poisonous. If not necessary, try to use less eye drops or take systemic medicine to prevent the effects of drug toxicity on the lens, especially hormonal drugs that can easily lead to cataracts.
In short, good living habits, stay away from smoking and alcohol, eat more vegetables and fruits to replenish various vitamins and trace elements, maintain a balanced nutrition, drink more water and exercise more, and be in a good mood to stay away from diseases. People are a whole, the key is balance, which organ problems, there will be other organs to suffer, as the saying goes: everyone good is really good! A healthy lifestyle not only helps delay the occurrence of cataracts, but is also essential for the elderly to prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension!