Many of you might be sleeping with your smartphones next to you and might be randomly checking them in between, isn’t it? Now, researchers have found 2 women who became blind due to these smartphones. Yes, this actually happened! They went blind in 1 eye after they gazed at their smartphones in darkness.
One of among them (22) always used to gaze at her phone before she went off to sleep. As per reports by the National Public Radio, “She would lie on her left side and look at the screen primarily with her right eye. Her left eye was often covered by the pillow,”
Another patient who was in her 40s faced the same problem. She actually took her smartphone and checked the news before sunrise i.e. again in darkness. Reports say that now it has been a year since her cornea is injured.
An ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital, Omar Mahroo stated
“They were looking at their smartphones and they just happened to have one eye covered because they were lying in bed. In both cases, nothing bad was going on. It is just that one retina was adapted to light and the other to dark”.
Basically, the retina constantly adjusts itself to light conditions if you leave a room and go to another dimmer room. However, both these women experienced a very rare situation in which the change was noticeable.
What researchers did for getting to the root of this problem?
The researchers asked these 2 patients to view the phone 1st with only the left eye and then only with the right eye. Then they came to know that the eye which temporarily went blind was the one which was being used for gazing at the screen.
For confirming this, Mahroo went to a dark room and gazed at the smartphone for 20 minutes constantly with 1 eye covered. He felt very strange.
He said that “After flashes of dim light, the retina that had been exposed to the screen took longer to adjust to new light settings.”
He says that many other patients have faced this same issue owing to smartphone use.