We are all aware of the many benefits and features of our expensive smartphone, but do we really know the dangers? Far from being a small, harmless device, studies regularly show us that our cell phone contains many health hazards. While we are already informed of the risks of cancer and sterility due to its waves, the possibilities of addiction that it induces or even the numerous germs it carries, other harmful effects are still unknown to us.
An article published in June 2016 in the New England Journal of Medicine has highlighted a new harmful consequence of the excessive use of this “wonderful little high-tech tool”: consulting it too often in the dark could make us temporarily blind! This warning is based not on suppositions, but on facts. Indeed, this medical article presents the case of two women who experienced temporary partial blindness following repeated consultation of their smartphone in bed at night. Ophthalmologists detail the ins and outs of this new-age domestic accident.
A new type of easily preventable domestic accident
Is the Moorfield’s Eye Hospital of London that the veil was recently lifted on the mystery surrounding the partial and temporary blindness of the two women, aged 22 and 40 respectively.
When they had come there complaining of recurring episodes of loss of vision in one eye, they were first subject to a battery of examinations ranging from MRI to cardiac tests. But as no disease or physiological abnormality could be discovered, Dr. Gordon Plant had the idea of questioning them about what they were doing before the appearance of these episodes of blindness. Their answers were then the same: before temporarily losing their sight, each of them claimed to have consulted their smartphone for a long time in the dark, while lying in bed. More precisely, it turned out that both of them had the habit of looking at the screen of their phones not only in the dark, but also with only one eye, the other being hidden in the pillow. Their repetitive loss of vision in one eye then appeared the next morning. In the youngest, temporary blindness only allowed her to see the contours of objects with her right eye, the left continuing to function normally. The second woman, for her part, suffered total blindness in one eye until sunrise. These episodes of vision loss could last up to 15 minutes.
For Dr. Plant, the observation is clear: it is indeed this inappropriate use of their visual function that was to blame. According to him, the blindness of these two women was caused by the dissociation of their two eyes for a significant and repeated period. By viewing their smartphones in the dark and with only one eye, the eye looking at the screen then had to adapt to the light from the phone screen while the other eye, hidden in the pillow, was adapted completely dark. It is, according to him, during the vision rebalancing phase, that is to say when the eye having been solicited by the smartphone screen was readapting to the vision of the second eye, that blindness occurs.
The ophthalmologist said this blindness was harmless and easily preventable. All you need to do is not use your smartphone in this way to avoid this new type of domestic accident. He sent the two women home without any special instructions other than to make sure they use both eyes when they check their smartphones in the dark!
Dr. Rahul Khurana, spokesperson for theAmerican Academy of Ophthalmology, for his part, considered that this was a fascinating hypothesis, but that two isolated cases cannot demonstrate that the cause of this blindness problem would be the use of the smartphone with only one eye in the black. He even doubts that many other users have experienced this problem.
Source: The Guardian