See Your Eye Doctor

(NAPSI)—During May, the National Eye Institute’s (NEI) Healthy Vision Month—or anytime—it’s important to keep your eye on your vision health. After all, the NEI, part of the National Institutes of Health, points out that your eyes deliver 80 percent of the information you take in every day.

Keep Your Eyes Healthy

To help, Henry Schein Medical and Welch Allyn encourage patients to talk to their primary care physician and ophthalmologist about eight suggestions offered by NEI:

• Get an eye exam: Many serious eye diseases don’t have any warning signs—so you could have an eye problem and not know it. Plus, you may not realize you could see better than you do. Getting a comprehensive dilated eye exam is the best way to stay on top of your eye health.

• Know your family’s eye health history: Many eye diseases run in families. Talk to your relatives about their eye health.

• Protect your eyes—at work and play: About 2,000 people in the United States get a serious work-related eye injury each day. People with sports-related eye injuries end up in the ER every 13 minutes. Wear protective eyewear, such as safety glasses, goggles and safety shields.

• Give your eyes a rest: If you spend a lot of time at the computer (or focusing on another specific thing), you may sometimes forget to blink—which can tire out your eyes. Try the 20-20-20 rule: Every 20 minutes, look away and focus about 20 feet in front of you for 20 seconds.

• Wear sunglasses (even on cloudy days): They can protect your eyes from the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. Get a pair that blocks out at least 99 percent of both UVA and UVB radiation.

• Eat eye-healthy foods: A diet rich in fruits and vegetables—especially dark leafy greens, such as spinach or kale—is important for keeping your eyes healthy. Research also shows that fish high in omega-3 fatty acids—salmon, tuna and halibut—can help protect your vision.

• Stay at a healthy weight: If you’re overweight or obese, you’re more likely to develop diabetes and other health problems that can lead to vision loss.

• Get plenty of physical activity: Regular physical activity can protect you from serious eye disease.

To help make eye health care easier for everyone, and advance vision health education, patients can benefit from new solutions available to doctors from Henry Schein Medical.

One, the Welch Allyn^® RetinaVue^® 100 Imager care delivery model, helps preserve the vision of patients with diabetes with a simple five-minute eye exam during routine primary care visits. Providers improve patient outcomes while lowering costs using affordable retinal cameras, HIPAA-compliant, FDA-cleared RetinaVue Network software, and remote interpretation by board-certified ophthalmologists.

The other, the Welch Allyn Spot™ Vision Screener, is an instrument-based screening device that can help physicians detect early signs of nearsightedness, farsightedness, blurred vision, unequal refractive power, eye misalignment and unequal pupil size among children as young as 6 months old.

The handheld screener uses lights and sounds to help engage children and can scan patients’ eyes in seconds from three feet away, for a noninvasive experience for children who may be less comfortable than adult patients during vision screenings. The device detects light reflexes from the retina to estimate refractive error and ocular misalignments, so practitioners can detect abnormalities quickly and accurately. There’s no need to wait until children can read an eye chart.

Explained Sean Donahue, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric ophthalmologist at Vanderbilt University, “Instrument-based vision screening of preschool children is an established and extremely cost-effective means of detecting the most common problems that would otherwise produce permanent visual impairment.”

Learn More

For more information about Healthy Vision Month and other resources, see https://nei.nih.gov/hvm. For doctors interested to learn more about the devices, visit www.henryschein.com/us-en/medical or call (800) 535-6663.