Smoking and vision
Constant smoking makes the world "colorless", scientists have found
Tobacco lovers who smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day lose the ability to distinguish colors much faster than other smokers and healthy people and are more likely to remain blind in old age, doctors write in the journal Psychiatry Research (Fernandes et al., Visual impediments in tobacco use disorder).
"Our colleagues have shown in the past that smoking almost doubles the risk of becoming a victim of retinal degeneration and contributes to inflammation and yellowing of the lens. We have shown that the use of a large number of cigarettes or constant contact with the components of their smoke negatively affects the perception of color and geometry," says Steven Silverstein from Rutgers University (Heavy Smoking Can Damage Vision, Rutgers Researcher Finds).
Smoking and related diseases have become one of the main causes of premature death worldwide today. According to statistics from the American Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately six million people die from tobacco and secondhand smoke every year. Two out of three smokers die for reasons related to tobacco abuse.
In recent years, doctors have found more and more evidence that the negative effects of tobacco and nicotine are not limited to the lungs alone. In particular, two years ago, biologists found out that tobacco smoke accelerates the aging of all organs of the body, irrevocably changes the structure of the walls of blood vessels, making them more brittle, and also contributes to the development of deafness.
In addition, nicotine and tobacco combustion products that enter the body of a pregnant woman contribute to the development of strabismus and reduce the level of intelligence not only in her children, but also in subsequent generations.Gorenje
Silverstein and his colleagues found another example of how smoking negatively affects health, observing for five years seven dozen healthy people who have never smoked, and the same number of avid tobacco lovers.
The second group included people who have smoked 20 cigarettes a day for the last decades and did not plan to give up the bad habit. None of them had previously had vision problems.
The authors of the article checked whether this is really the case, using a simple visual acuity test program that displayed rectangles covered with stripes or painted over with solid color, as well as sets of geometric shapes made up of many multicolored circles.
Each of these figures and sets of stripes was displayed on the screen only for a couple of moments, which prevented the volunteers from studying them in detail and forced them to rely only on reaction and intuition. The results of these measurements for smokers and healthy people turned out to be very clear.
On average, non-smoking volunteers had almost twice as contrasting vision as tobacco lovers, and about two to three times better at recognizing geometric shapes. This was especially evident in cases where they were made up of circles of three different colors.
According to the researchers, such differences are due to the fact that nicotine and tobacco gorenje products directly affect the eyes, and not just worsen the visual centers in the brain of a smoker.
On the other hand, it is also possible that the contrast of vision has deteriorated due to the narrowing of the vessels in the retina and the increased concentration of oxidants in its cells, characteristic of cigarette lovers. In the near future, they plan to test these theories by observing how the vision of people who have recently given up tobacco and switched to nicotine patches or chewing gum will change.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru