Woman Who Observed The Solar Eclipse With Defective Lenses Suffered A Crescent-shaped Burn In One Of Her Eyes

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

The total eclipse of the sun in August was accompanied by a warning that was widely covered in the media: do not observe the sun without protective glasses.

What had the least coverage, according to Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, was how to choose the right protective glasses and that lack of information was the source of a case study that the assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Icahn School of Medicine of the Mount Sinai Hospital published Thursday in JAMA Ophthalmology.

In it, Deobhakta and his colleagues describe the case of a young woman between 20 and 30 years old who observed the eclipse through what turned out to be defective lenses. Four hours after observing the Sun for about six seconds without the lenses and then about 15 or 20 seconds with them, she began to experience color and visual distortions, as well as blurred vision, particularly in the left eye. She could also see a "black center point" with her left eye.

At the Mount Sinai New York Eye and Ear Infirmary (NYEE), doctors used adaptive optics to examine detailed images of the cells that make up the photoreceptor layer of the retina, the part of the eye that converts the light into electrical energy that the brain can interpret. Technology allowed them to analyze sun-related damage, called retinopathy, in extreme detail, Deobhakta said. They found that the eclipse had apparently caused a crescent-shaped burn on the woman's retina.

"We had the opportunity to classify the damage to the photoreceptors to such an extent that it almost appeared as a shadow of a crescent in the photoreceptor area," Deobhakta explained. "What anyone would have thought could happen happened in some way and has been demonstrated thanks to cutting-edge technology."

When asked to draw what she saw through the affected eye (see above), the woman corroborated the researchers' findings by charting what "somehow looks like Pac-Man," Deobhakta said. Six weeks after the eclipse, her symptoms persisted.

The woman in the case study was one of 22 people who came to the NYEE with complaints of eclipse-related conditions. Of these, only three had structural visual problems and only the woman described in the article had severe solar retinopathy to be included in the trial. Still, Deobhakta said the opportunity to study the condition in such detail was unprecedented.

“Normally we don't have eclipses and when they do, [we usually don't have] patients who observe the eclipse and come to an eye hospital with the appropriate technology to examine them. At least in the New York area there has not been an eclipse since we developed this technology, "he said. "That all these things happen at once is very rare."

The confluence of factors revealed something in particular, Deobhakta said: before the next total eclipse, in seven years, we need to be more informed about the right lenses to observe eclipses.

This article originally appeared on People.com