Worried of your dry eye? Here’s a comprehensive guide to the causes, signs and symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and prevention to your dry eye disease.
The layer of tears covering your cornea undergoes the principal effect of your dry eye disease. Dry eye conditions cause your tears to evaporate too fast, resulting in insufficiency of tears in your eyes. A gritty feeling with an itchy and burning sensation is the most common symptom of a dry eye. Take a look further to discover treatment methods, eye drops or other solutions for your dry eye disease.
Tears occur in three different layers and function in covering and protecting the surface of your eyes. The condition of dry eye affects this tear film the most. For a clear and comfortable vision, your team film must be stable and smooth enough. Dry eye disorder disrupts your tear film, leading to symptoms like blurred vision, itchiness or burning sensation.
The proper functioning of your tear film may face obstacles due to several factors, and this eventually leads to conditions of dry eyes. This is why healthcare experts often regard dry eye as a multi-factorial disease. Dry eye may gradually lead to serious optical complications or other severe consequences. It is, therefore, essential to find out the root causes of this problem. Timely management and treatment under the supervision of ophthalmologists can help take control over your dry eye condition.
Most of the people mistake dry eye disease as a mere condition of insufficient production of tears from your eyes. However, this is not the case. Following is a brief description of the different types of dry eye disease:
This particular condition may be due to autoimmune conditions generating inflammation in your lacrimal gland. This is the reason you cannot get enough tears.
The occurrence of dry eye syndrome is quite common. According to research surveys, more than 16 million people of the US population experience dry eye disease. In fact, tens of millions of people across the globe are likely to experience dry eye conditions.
On the other hand, the Asian population is more prone to develop dry eye symptoms in comparison to the Europeans or North Americans. Besides racial background, females undergoing menopause frequently get this conditions.
A dry eye may occur on its own or it may be a result of some underlying medical condition. In most of the cases, dry eye indicates:
In case of a dry eye condition, you might feel like the presence of some foreign substance in your eyes. This leads to a gritty, scratchy and sandy sensation. The most common symptoms of dry eye conditions are:
The last symptom of getting watery eyes may appear confusing during a dry eye disease. However, this is a common sign of a dry eye. The actual cause of this symptom is when your meibomian gland fails to make adequate oils to cover the outer layer of your tear film. As a result, rapid evaporation of the middle water layer of your tear film takes place.
In order to compensate this, your lacrimal gland works on producing more watery tears. However, due to the absence of the oily layer these tears are not fit for coating your eyes.
Some common cause of dry eyes includes:
However, a number of other factors may be responsible for such complications, further worsening your dry eye symptoms.
There are some uncontrollable risks associated with your dry eye disease. In fact, your advancing ages make these risks more likely. However, you may be able to handle and adjust with some milder risks through medications.
You must consult a healthcare specialist if you observe the occurrence of any of these risk factors:
Healthcare professionals use certain strategies to diagnose your dry eye condition. The most common strategies for dry eye diagnosis include:
Before your diagnosis, you healthcare provider will definitely enquire the complete details of your past medical record. At such cases, you may require to fill in a questionnaire to inform your health concerns and ongoing symptoms in detail. For this, you need to prepare information on the following:
Next the eye specialist will run an eye exam to check your optical health and the causes of your symptoms. For this, the doctor will examine:
Finally, the doctor will proceed towards testing your eye.
No single test can diagnose your eye health. Healthcare providers run a series of tests for this purpose.
Healthcare providers also run other tests like antibody assessments to examine your underlying conditions of dry eye.
If you find trouble to see things clearly, we are more than happy to help. Arrange an appointment with our optometrist and get early treatment.
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The primary goals of dry eye treatment are to:
Depending on the severity of your symptoms, your healthcare specialist will select which treatment will work the best for your dry eye condition.
Certain dry eyes remedies can make your symptoms mild, and offer you natural cure for dry eyes.
Your healthcare provider may recommend you different kinds of eye drops. However, consult an ophthalmologist as to which one treats your condition the best.
If you are not getting enough tears, punctual occlusion may be an effective option for you. This can be a temporary or a permanent procedure to enhance your tear production. The healthcare providers inserts a plug into your punctum, the tear drum present on your lower eyelid. You need not worry as this process is absolutely painless. Remember that this plugging helps in tear retention in your eyes.
In temporary punctual occlusion, there is a quick dissolution of the plug. Observing your reactivity and improvement of your dry eye, the doctor recommends you a permanent occlusion in the punctum. A silicon plug is used in this case for the durability of the plug in your tear ducts for a much longer period.
There are other dry eye therapy options as well to provide you help for dry eyes. For example,
You can feel pain even while blinking if you are facing a dry eye condition. This is due to the irritation in your eye surface occurring due to the rubbing of your dry eyelids. Contact lenses offer cure for dry eyes by lubricating your eye surface. Different forms of therapeutic contact lenses include:
To prevent the risks of dry eye disease, you can follow measures like:
Dry eye disease is basically a chronic condition that does not have any permanent cure. Instead, you may seek treatment options that help managing your symptoms. Although it is quite a stressful process, but the effort is worth it as that eases your current dry eye symptoms.
Dry eye disorder causes massive discomfort in your daily life. While managing your symptoms, you may start to feel anxiety, stress and exhaustion. In fact, all these can ultimately affect your quality of life. Consult your healthcare provider and eye specialist in such case to manage your dry eye symptoms effectively.
Remember that millions of people suffer from dry eye disease. You can connect with different communities through online platforms to take their suggestions based on their experience. In fact, sharing your challenges and concerns can help in making your life a little better each day.
Once you develop the dry eye disease, your ophthalmologist will guide you on when you need to visit an appointment. If any other medical condition underlies your dry eye condition, you need regular follow-ups from general physicians as well.
You need to immediately see an eye specialist if you encounter:
Dry eye disease impacts much more than simply disturbing the comfort of your eyes. You can even begin to face impairments in working, socializing or enjoying your life. A chronic dry eye condition may lead to severe risks if not treated timely.
Contact Vision Cure Clinic to get treatment and effective solutions to your dry eye symptoms from our efficient ophthalmologists and eye specialists.
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