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Saturday, November 23, 2024  
20 Jumada Al-Awwal 1446  

Usage of smartphones in bed can cause blindness

Photo: FILE Photo: FILE

WEB DESK: This would be particularly alarming to smartphone users, as checking your phones in bed could wreck havoc to one’s eyes and may lead to temporary blindness.

Two women went temporarily blind from constantly checking their phones in the dark, say doctors who are now warning others to this unusual condition. A team of London-based researchers come across two separate cases where women reported temporary blindness, and both times in their right eye. The temporary blindness was reported on many occasions and over the course of several months.

This temporary vision loss, called "transient monocular visual loss” and it seems to have been caused when these women were using their smartphones in the dark, said a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

So how did it occurred, Mashable reported that both the women typically looked at their smartphones with only one eye while resting on their side in bed in the dark, whereas their other eye was covered by the pillow, explained Dr. Gordon Plant of Moorfield's Eye Hospital in London.

"So you have one eye adapted to the light because it's looking at the phone and the other eye is adapted to the dark," he said.

So what happens is that when they put their phone down, they were unable to see with the phone eye, as "it's taking many minutes to catch up to the other eye that's adapted to the dark," added Plant.

However, the good news is that the temporary blindness disappeared, when their doctors simply told the women to look at their phones with both eyes while in the dark.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2016