How Drinking Alcohol Can Hurt Your Eyes
We’ve all heard the news by now: alcohol consumption, especially excessive consumption, can have serious and negative health effects. While a drink here or there, especially if it’s of the right kind of alcohol, can have a mild health benefit, we’d all likely be better off limiting the amount of alcohol we consume.
Alcohol consumption can damage your liver, brain, cardiovascular health, kidneys, and many of the other systems and organs of the body. It can impair your reaction time, reflexes, motor function, and cognitive skills. These are all relatively well known facts. Additionally, consuming alcohol can affect your eyes and your vision – and not just while you’re imbibing. Here’s how.
The Short-Term Effects of Alcohol Consumption on Your Vision
The short term effects of alcohol on your vision may be more varied than you realize. Drinking alcohol, especially in excess, can have serious effects on your vision. Your eyes may do the looking, but your brain does the seeing.
Alcohol consumption weighs on both the optic nerve (the conduit for information from the eyes to where it is processed in the brain), and the passing of neurotransmitters from nerve cell to nerve cell within the brain. This can lead to blurred vision, loss of peripheral vision, decreased color vision, and loss of contrast sensitivity.
Short-term excessive alcohol consumption can also lead to broken blood vessels in the eyes, decreased reaction time to light in the pupils, weakened eye increased sensitivity to light, and involuntary rapid eye movement.
The Long-Term Effects of Drinking on Your Vision
For those who may consume excess alcohol on a regular basis, especially those who do so for several years or decades, the effects of alcohol on the vision can be much more profoundly detrimental.
Long-term excessive alcohol consumption can cause chronic migraines in some people. It can also lead to a condition called optical neuropathy, a steady loss of vision that shows up especially in those who both smoke and drink excessively.
Excessive alcohol consumption can also cause permanent loss of vision, a condition called toxic amblyopia. Further, the liver issues associated with chronic overconsumption can have negative impacts on your eyesight as well.
What You Can Do to Minimize the Risk to Your Eyes
As with the other negative health impacts of overconsumption of alcohol, the only real way to minimize the risk of heavy drinking to your eyesight is to decrease your consumption of alcohol. Most health professionals are in agreement that consuming more than one drink per hour is hard on your health.
Furthermore, limiting consumption to no more than three drinks for women and four drinks for men, per day, and no more than twenty-one drinks per week for men, fourteen for women, is ideal. Even these numbers may be higher than one should follow, when looking to maintain excellent eye health.
Celebrating While Maintaining Your Eye Health
Many people consume alcohol as part of their everyday lives. Furthermore, alcohol consumption is associated with celebration, dating, and many other aspects of our society. Getting away from consuming alcohol entirely, while ideal from a health perspective, may not exactly be ideal for you and your current lifestyle.
However, understanding the risks related to alcohol consumption, especially excessive drinking, can be the key to helping to keep your body and your eyesight functioning as highly as possible. Keeping an eye on how much alcohol you’re consuming can also help you to preserve and protect your sight well into your golden years.