Love Your Eyes: The Call on World Sight Day

The importance of caring for our ocular health at any age is the focus of the global observance today for World Sight Day, celebrated every second Thursday of October.

Love Your Eyes is the central theme of the day, led by the World Health Organization alongside health institutions across the planet.

The call to action reflects that eye health is fundamental to maintaining a good quality of life and insists that diseases like glaucoma, age-related macular degeneration, and retinopathies are some of the main causes of vision loss in adults.

The problem is that, in most cases, these pathologies progress silently and without obvious symptoms in their early stages. Detecting them in time is key to avoiding irreversible damage.

The retina and the optic nerve are very sensitive structures. Once damaged, they do not regenerate. This means that vision lost to glaucoma or retinopathy cannot be recovered. However, current treatments can halt the progression of these diseases if they are diagnosed in the initial stages.

They emphasize that periodic ophthalmological check-ups, especially from the age of 40 or in people with risk factors (family history, hypertension, diabetes, smoking, high myopia), are the best tool for prevention.

It is also very important to be able to detect amblyopia or lazy eye early in children, as after 7-8 years of age it becomes very difficult to treat. At this age, it is also important to correct strabismus and detect disorders of the visual skills involved in learning in order to provide appropriate vision therapy and prevent academic failure due to this cause.

Data from the Pan American Health Organization highlights that in nine countries of the region, the highest prevalence of blindness and visual impairment is found in rural and marginalized areas.

The burden of blindness is not uniformly distributed in Latin America and the Caribbean. In many countries, it is estimated that for every million inhabitants, there are five thousand blind people and twenty thousand people with visual impairment; at least two-thirds of these cases are due to treatable causes such as cataract, refractive errors, diabetic retinopathy, childhood blindness, glaucoma, onchocerciasis, and trachoma.