Among the millions of people who enjoyed watching Monday’s solar eclipse, some came away noticing changes in their eyesight. Local eye doctors say if you were one of them, and if you’re still experiencing changes a day later, make an appointment for an eye exam.
When Atlanta optometrist Lauren Dyak arrived at her office Tuesday, her first patient expressed concerns about looking briefly at the solar eclipse without proper eye protection.
“I did not find anything concerning about her eyes though,” said Dyak, director of Woolfson Eye Institute’s Dry Eye Clinic and a member of the Georgia Optometric Association.
Dyak’s patient wasn’t alone in her fears of eye injury from Monday’s eclipse. Google searches for “eyes hurt” and similar queries spiked after most Americans experienced the celestial phenomenon.
Woolfson Eye’s switchboard did not register an uptick in patients calling about eye pain. Dyak was quick to point out that eye and vision damage from viewing an eclipse typically occurs in the back of the eye, the retina, which has no pain receptors. “Improper eclipse viewing can cause vision damage but would not typically result in discomfort to the eye. The concern is the potentially permanent damage to the vision from retinal injury,” Dyak said.
“Looking directly at a light source as intense as the sun, even on a typical day, but certainly during a solar eclipse, can ultimately cause a person to see dark spots or experience blurry vision, usually days or weeks later.” She added that the briefly distorted colors or the tendency to continue to see an image of the sun for a few minutes after looking at the eclipse, even with proper eye protection, is not an indication of permanent vision damage. “After looking at a bright light source, such as the sun or even the flash of a camera, you may continue to see an image of that object even after looking away, something known as an afterimage,” she said.
Following the last solar eclipse in 2017, Dyak recalls patients to her then Midtown office calling with eye concerns within seconds after the event. “Right after the solar eclipse ended, the phones were ringing off the hook. The reality is that symptoms from watching an eclipse without adequate eye protection are not that instantaneous.”
Most of the vision changes will be temporary and improve over time, Dyak said. But prolonged exposure to the eclipse resulting in changes in vision, such as new dark or blurry spots, is suspicious enough to require a visit to an eye care provider. “If vision symptoms are present days or weeks after eclipse viewing, it’s definitely time to see an eye doctor for a retinal evaluation.”
Looking directly at the sun can cause permanent damage to the deep layers of the retina, the thin tissue at the back of the eyeball essential for vision. There is no treatment for this damage, also known as “solar retinopathy,” according to Dr. Alla Goldberg, a retina specialist with Northside Hospital.
Think of the eye like a camera. The retina is the film and a dark spot in the center of the picture is the vision damage, she explained.
After the 2017 eclipse, a New York woman suffered from blurred vision and permanent dark spots after staring directly into the sun for a total of 26 seconds, according to a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology.
Severe damage such as she suffered is permanent and typically impacts central vision. Those with less exposure can recover, Goldberg said.
Diagnosing eye damage is particularly difficult when it involves children. Parents who suspect their children may have looked at the sun too long should check with their eye doctor, Goldberg said. Young children may not notice an issue and school-age children may not attribute their difficulty reading or differentiating numbers and letters to eye damage. “They probably won’t complain, and they are not going to tell you what’s going on.”
So when is a visual abnormality cause for emergency? Failing to sufficiently protect your eyes while watching an eclipse typically results in color distortion and changes to central eye vision, according to Dr. Danny Branstetter, chief medical officer for Wellstar Kennestone Regional Medical Center.
If someone sees bright flashes of light, loss of light, vision loss, blacked-out spots or partially obscured sight, eye redness or swelling, they need to go to the emergency room, said Branstetter, who is also Wellstar Health System’s medical director of infection prevention.
Eye emergencies may arise at the same time as the eclipse, but they are usually not related to the event, he said.
The first step after experiencing vision changes, he added, is to contact your eye doctor to determine whether you need to be seen.
“The good news is most injuries from an eclipse resolve on their own.” It could take 3 to 6 months, though. “The wrong thing to do is to have visual changes that go unaddressed and mistakenly chalked up to the eclipse.”
