vision

Imagine smelling a rose and not being able to place the smell.  Imagine eating mom’s chocolate chip cookies, but finding out you don’t recognize the taste. 

While it’s likely you know someone who temporarily lost his or her sense of smell or taste as a result of Covid, it seems almost impossible for someone to no longer be able to look at a common object, word, or even face, and be unable to tell what or who it is. However, that’s exactly what happens when someone is afflicted by a rare condition known as visual agnosia.

Defining visual agnosia

According to the United Brain Association, agnosia is a communication disorder that disrupts and impairs the brain’s ability to process sensory cues, most commonly visual and auditory cues.

Visual agnosia specifically disrupts your brain’s ability to process and understand what you are seeing with your eyes. In other words, your eyes are working correctly and as they normally would, but your brain is not.

As the medical community learns more about visual agnosia, they have come to understand there are actually several different types of the condition, including types that specifically affect your ability to recognize common objects (akinetopsia), words (alexia), colors (achromatopsia), and even familiar faces (prosopagnosia).

In the U.S., there were 24.4 million cases of cataracts in 2010, and the number is expected to double to 50 million by 2050, according to the National Eye Institute.

What is a cataract?

A cataract is a clouding of the crystalline lens inside the eye which leads to a decline in vision. Aging is the most common reason for a cataract, but other factors include disease, trauma, and certain medications. Most cataracts grow slowly over decades, but some may progress more quickly.

The crystalline lens is the structure located in the middle of the eye, in front of the retina, but behind the iris (colored part). All light that enters the eye goes through the cornea and the lens to get to the retina. If a cataract is affecting the lens, distorted vision is the result. Glasses and contacts are unable to correct the vision until the cataract is removed.

You live a busy life. With the responsibilities associated with your job, family, and well, everything, you may not get enough sleep.

More than one in three Americans don’t get enough sleep—defined as seven or more hours each—on a regular basis, according to the CDC. It’s been well established a lack of sleep can increase the risk of a number of serious health issues including high blood pressure, obesity, and depression, but does it contribute to serious or long-term problems for the health of your eyes?

Lack of sleep can leave you looking worn-down and with dark circles or heavy bags under your eyes. While this isn’t an ideal look, it’s usually nothing that a good night’s sleep can’t fix. However, as doctors learn more about our vision it has become abundantly clear that a chronic lack of sleep can have significant, and in some cases lasting, effects on your vision and the overall health of your eyes.

It’s often said the brain is an extension of the eye, and for that reason a headache may be a symptom of an vision problem.  Headaches that are related to the eye can be of the forehead, temples, behind the eyes, and at the back of the skull. They may be excruciating or dull. They may or not be alleviated by Tylenol or sleep. They may even present with blurred vision.

If you are having headaches with blurry vision, your eye doctor may ask you the following questions:

• Where do your headaches occur?
• Do you wake up with headaches? Do they worsen with near work?
• How long does your vision stay blurry when you have the headache?
• If you were to grade the severity of the headache on a 1-10 scale, what number would you give?

Here are the 8 most common reasons for headaches combined with blurry vision, and how they are diagnosed and treated.