Trauma and prescriptions changes in adults from 20 to 40 years of age

06/03/2018

The young adult stage spans from 20 to 40 years old approximately. It is a highly productive and vigorous period.

Trauma

Broadly speaking, trauma takes first place in the ranking of causes of eye pathologies. Trauma is an emergency that usually manifests itself in a variety of ways. One of the most frequent is the impact of particles on the eye surface, called “foreign bodies” in ophthalmology jargon. This normally occurs in jobs where jigsaws, radial arm saws and knife grinders are used. In this instance, prevention through the use of safety goggles is our best friend, since on many occasions, repairing the scars is difficult and even involves the risk of losing the eye if the impact perforates the eyeball.

Trauma can occasionally be caused by corrosive chemical products, in which case the first course of action should be deep and immediate cleaning with saline solution or tap water and an emergency visit to your ophthalmologist. Even so, these situations are complicated in the long term if there is irreversible damage to the stem cells on the surface of the eye, specifically the area called the limbus.

There is another type of trauma related to sun exposure, called actinic keratoses. This lesion is relatively benign as it tends to heal in a few days; however, it causes pain and reduces visual acuity. In this case, the key is to use sunglasses to prevent it—particularly when you are doing winter or aquatic sports.

Prescriptions changes

There are times when people around the age of 20 get tired eyes after long days of reading. The reason is usually related to a refractive error known as hypermetropia. To understand this concept, we should clarify that it refers to a focusing error generally associated with the size of the eyeball—which is usually small. It is interesting to remember that there is a crystalline lens inside the eye—a lens that changes shape with the help of a muscle—so that we can read and see objects up close.

Where children and adolescents are concerned, their accommodation capacity is so great that it might even conceal some small errors. However, this characteristic reduces the muscle's power at an early age and it may weaken when we spend a lot of time reading. This is when adolescents who, due to work or study commitments, have their nose stuck to a screen or in a book for many hours on end. The main symptom is tired eyes that lose focus up close after hours of reading. This may be accompanied by headaches and even redness of the eyes.

Dr. José Lamarca