Gazing at smartphone in the dark may cause 'blindness'

Zee Media Bureau

New Delhi: This comes as a warning for all those who keep their smartphone devices next to them while sleeping and have a habit of gazing at their precious phones in the dark.

Researchers have recently found two women who were affected by transient smartphone blindness.

 

The first patient - a 22-year-old woman in England - had a habit of gazing at her smartphone before falling asleep.

"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," www.npr.org reported on Thursday.

The other patient in her 40s had similar problems when she woke up before sunrise and checked the news on her smartphone before sitting up.

It had been going on for about a year, ever since she had injured her cornea. Around the same time, she bought a smartphone, the report added.

"They were looking at their smartphones and they just happened to have one eye covered because they were lying in bed," Omar Mahroo, ophthalmologist at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London and an author reported in a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

"In both cases, nothing bad was going on," Mahroo said, adding that it is just that one retina was adapted to light and the other to dark.

"The retina is pretty amazing because it can adapt to lots of different light levels, probably better than any camera," he noted.

Retinas constantly adjust when someone leaves a room and enters a slightly dimmer room or goes inside after being outdoors.

But these two women experienced a rare scenario in which that change would actually be noticeable.

To get to the root of the problem, the researchers asked the two patients to view the smartphone with just the left eye and then just the right eye on separate occasions.

They realised that the eye going temporarily "blind" was always the one that was being used to look at the bright screen.

To confirm this further, Mahroo went in a dark room and with one eye covered, looked at a smartphone for 20 minutes before turning off the screen.

"It did actually feel quite strange," he said. "It would be very alarming if you didn't know what was going on."

(With IANS inputs)