Melanin, the same compound that determines skin and hair color, is also responsible for why we have different eye colors.

Melanin helps to protect the eye by absorbing light (including some UV light) that hits the iris, which is the part of the eye that controls the amount of light that reaches the retina.

How Rare Are Different Eye Colors?

Anyone living in an English-speaking country might have the impression that eye colors like blue, hazel, and brown are about equally distributed across the population, but if you look at the whole planet, the ratios are very different. Brown eyes in varying shades are by far the most common, while blue eyes likely all trace back to a single common ancestor with a specific mutation. These are the percentages of different eye colors in the population:

• Brown: 70-79%
• Blue: 8-10%
• Hazel: 5%
• Gray: 3%
• Green 2%
• Red or violet: less than 1%
• Heterochromia (partly or completely different-colored eyes): 1%

Types of Melanin and Pigment

Melanin in the iris comes in two different types: eumelanin (which produces a deep chocolate brown color) and pheomelanin (which produces colors ranging between amber, green, and hazel). But what about blue eyes? Blue eyes are basically the absence of melanin. There isn’t any actual blue pigment present, but like the sky and the ocean, blue irises get their color from the way the light scatters around the iris, called Tyndall scattering.

Eyes can be green if there is some melanin present but not enough to completely obscure all of the Tyndall scattering, so there’s a bit of blue appearance mixing with yellowish pigment. Eyes are hazel when they have just enough melanin to obscure any Tyndall scattering. Very rare red and “violet” eyes (typical in albinism, as pictured above) come from a total lack of melanin in all layers of the iris, so the color is a combination of Tyndall scattering and the blood vessels being more visible.

The Genetics of Eye Color Is Complex

In recent years, scientists have found that eye color isn’t only controlled by a single gene but by as many as 16 genes working in tandem. Tiny changes to any of those genes can lead to a different color. This means that you can’t always predict a child’s eye color based on how their parents’ eyes look. Blue-eyed parents won’t necessarily produce blue-eyed children every single time.

Why Do Babies Often Start With Blue Eyes?

Sometimes babies (most commonly caucasian babies) are born with blue or gray eyes that change to a different color over time. Just like the way some kids have platinum blonde hair that darkens nearly to brown in adulthood, it can take time for the cells in their eyes to produce melanin. Exposure to light can trigger melanin production, and that can’t happen until they’ve been exposed to light for a while.

Other Causes of Eye Color Change

You probably had a friend in school who claimed their eyes would change colors every day. More likely it was a trick of the light based on how their eyes reflected the different outfits they wore. Eye color can also appear different with changes in pupil size or the type of light the person is in. Aging can cause a very gradual change in eye color with more melanin production, and an eye injury can also cause permanent eye color change. David Bowie was a famous example of this.
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Interested in Artificially Changing Your Eye Color With Contacts?

For the last few decades, anyone who has wanted a change in their eye color could turn to color contacts. If you’re interested in changing your eye color with contacts, we can help! Just keep in mind that a colored layer curving over the round surface of your eye won’t look quite the same as natural eye color in a flat layer beneath the surface of the eye.

We love seeing our patients’ beautiful eyes! Schedule your appointment today!

Diabetes is a disease that can negatively affect health in many ways, including healthy eyesight.

Diabetes brings with it an increased risk of developing several different eye diseases. These are grouped under the umbrella term “diabetic eye disease,” and they include cataracts, glaucoma, diabetic macular edema (DME), and diabetic retinopathy. With all of these combined, diabetes is a leading cause of blindness all across the world and that’s why it’s so important to schedule your routine diabetic eye exams.

The Mechanics of Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes (or gestational diabetes, which works the same way while it lasts) impairs the body’s ability to use insulin to regulate blood sugar effectively. If it isn’t carefully controlled, this can lead to periods of high blood sugar. Sugar feeds harmful bacteria, so high blood sugar is hard on blood vessels and raises the risk of infection. Let’s take a closer look at what that means for these sight-threatening conditions.

Cataracts

People with diabetes are two to five times more likely to develop cataracts than people without. The reason diabetes increases the risk of developing cataracts because poorly controlled blood sugar can cause swelling in the eye’s lens, and can cause opaque proteins to accumulate in the lens, making it cloudy. Fortunately, cataract removal surgery is a very common, safe procedure.

Glaucoma

Our eyes are constantly replacing the fluids inside them to keep functioning properly. Glaucoma is when the pressure on the optic nerve increases, and damage occurs (up to and including permanent blindness). Diabetics are more likely to develop glaucoma than their non-diabetic peers. Glaucoma doesn’t always have symptoms in the early stages, which is one reason it’s so important to keep up with regular eye exams.

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Diabetic Retinopathy And DME

Retinopathy is when the blood vessels in the back of the eye leak blood into the fluid that fills the eye, appearing as dark blotches in the field of vision. Our eyes attempt to compensate for the damaged blood vessels by growing new ones. This isn’t very effective because the new vessels are fragile and more likely to leak than the original ones.

High blood sugar puts a serious strain on blood vessels, which is why diabetes is such a serious risk factor for retinopathy. If it advances far enough, diabetic retinopathy can become DME, which involves blurred central vision and can lead to retinal detachment and blindness.

Protect Your Sight with Regular Diabetic Eye Exams

Your two best resources for protecting your sight from the effects of diabetes are you and your eye doctor. If you can keep your blood sugar close to normal levels, you will reduce your risk of these eye diseases. Meanwhile, when you come in for regular eye exams, we can check for any early signs of problems, reducing the risk of blindness by as much as 95 percent.

Do you have diabetes or a loved one who does?

Give us a call or text to schedule your appointment today! 219-659-3050

Madeline complained about constant headaches and motion sickness on car rides before coming to the Levin Eye Care Center home vision therapy program. She had lost all interest in reading because of the challenges with headaches. Also, she was having problems maintaining consistent grades throughout the school year and struggled with time management, especially completing assignments.

Since enrolling in Vision Therapy, Madeline now enjoys reading for leisure and has more patience at school.

Madeline Now Exhibits:

• Increased patience when doing homework
• Improved ocular motor skills when reading
• Improved accommodation (focusing ability) when reading
• Enhanced convergence (when eyes move inward to focus)
• More confident and a better attitude at school

Since completing the Vision Therapy program at Levin Eye Care Center, Madeline is more confident in school, reading aloud, and displays a positive attitude. Now, Madeline has fewer headaches, can control her focus longer, and enjoys school more due to increased comprehension skills.

Comfortable vision is critical to a child’s development and an at home Vision Therapy program combined with office visits gives the best results.

If these symptoms sound familiar, either for you or a child in your life, we can help! Call or text us at 219-659-3050 to schedule an appointment today!

When we think of athletes, we probably think of speed and strength first, but there is an unfair advantage some athletes are using called sports vision training.

Strong visual skills are just as important to an athlete’s success as strong muscles. Athletes have to process visual information quickly so that they can respond to it. The cool thing is that, like muscles, some visual skills can be improved with practice. Sports vision training improves the acceleration and efficiency of your eye tracking capabilities. We have a set of activities and equipment specifically designed for athletes to improve processing speed, visual acuity, vergence (binocular vision), tracking, and reaction time at levels that beat the competition.

What Visual Skills do Athletes Use?

Here are some of the most essential visual skills that help athletes perform at the top of their game:

• Color vision. It’s a lot easier to recognize the difference between teammate and opponent when you can see the different jersey colors!
• Depth perception. Athletes need to be able to judge the distances of objects and other players.
• Dynamic visual acuity. Beyond just having clear vision, athletes need to be able to see fast-moving objects clearly too.
• Eye tracking. Athletes also need to be able to track fast-moving objects with their eyes instead of jeopardizing their balance by turning their heads or torsos.
• Eye-hand-body coordination. Being able to adjust the position of your body, hands, and feet based on what you see is essential for succeeding in sports.
• Peripheral vision. Athletes need to be able to react to what’s happening at the edges of their vision, not just the things happening straight ahead.
• Visual concentration. An athlete needs to be able to focus on what matters even when there are a lot of distractions trying to draw their eyes.
• Visual reaction time. The faster an athlete can process and respond to visual information, the faster they can get into position.
• Visualization. Athletes need to be able to picture different scenarios to prepare themselves for potential obstacles and opportunities — all while focusing on the events of the moment.
• Visual memory. An athlete must keep a great deal of visual information in their heads while playing, including the positions of other players based on where they saw them last.

You Can Train Your Visual Skills on the Go

You won’t need a gym to train several of these visual skills. A simple exercise for depth perception, for example, is to hold a pen at arm’s length and repeatedly put the cap on it. You could also hold a small pebble at arm’s length and try dropping it into a drinking straw.

A great way to train peripheral awareness is by turning our heads to the side while we use a computer or watch TV. We can improve the flexibility of our eyes by switching rapidly between focusing on something close and something far away. To practice dynamic visual acuity, try cutting out different sized letters from a magazine and taping them to a turntable. Then see how well you can identify the letters when it spins at different speeds.

Take a peek how Four Time NBA Champion, Two Time MVP and Finals MVP Steph Curry uses Sports Vision Training to achieve excellence on the court.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball, Athletes!

If NBA Champions Michael Jordan, Steph Curry, and Kawhi Leonard have used sports vision training to rise to elite levels, then why shouldn’t you follow their lead?  Keeping our eyes sharp (and healthy) is something we might overlook but when thinking about staying in shape for sports. From professional athletes sinking a three pointer at the final second to commercial pilots flying the friendly skies. Sports Therapy Training is a game changer and makes all the difference in the world.

If you’ve played sports, then you know an inch and a millisecond can be the difference between a win and loss. Gain the advantage on and off the field with the Levin Eye Care Center sport vision training program!

Call/Text 219-659-3050 to learn how to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.

Cataracts are the world’s leading cause of blindness, and the history of treating them is long and fascinating.

Over 20 million adults 40 and up in the US will develop cataracts, and by the time they reach 80, half of them will. Normally, the lenses in our eyes are filled with transparent protein, but the protein can become clumped together over time and turn opaque, resulting in symptoms such as light sensitivity, glare, dim or clouded vision, halo effects around lights, impaired night vision, double vision in a single eye, faded colors, and more frequent changes to glasses prescriptions.

French Impressionism and Cataract Surgery in the 1920s

No one wants their vision blocked by cataracts, but it’s a particularly intolerable condition for someone who paints for a living. Such was the fate of Claude Monet, perhaps the most famous Impressionist painter. His vision began deteriorating from cataracts in his mid-fifties, which is clear from the increasingly muddy color palette in his paintings from that time.

Monet hesitated to get cataract surgery because it hadn’t gone well for some of his fellow artists. He tried eye drops for a while, but eventually gave in and got the surgery on one eye in 1923. He proved to be a very uncooperative patient, but the combination of surgery and thick glasses did grant him greatly improved vision for the next few years. His paintings during that period look much more like his pre-cataract work.

Cataract Surgery Today

If he lived today, Monet never would have hesitated to get cataract surgery. Thanks to advancements, there’s no need for bulky glasses because the clouded lenses can simply be replaced with artificial ones! Every year, three million Americans undergo cataract surgery, after which they enjoy up to 20/20 vision, even if they haven’t had it in decades. Cataract surgery has an incredibly high success rate, at around 98-99%.

Lifestyle Changes

Minor changes can have a big impact on your overall health and a great way to reduce your risk of developing cataracts. Also, manage related conditions such as high blood pressure, obesity, kidney disease, and diabetes.

Some easy ways to reduce your risks are:

• Get routine eye exams
• Quit smoking
• Protecting your eyes from the sun
• Limit your alcohol consumption
• Fill up on Antioxidants
• Eat Omega-3 rich fatty foods
• Reduce Sugar intake

Modern Cataract Treatment Chicago

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Have You Noticed Any Cataract Symptoms?

If you’ve been experiencing any changes to your vision that sound like the above, we recommend scheduling an eye exam. In this day and age, there’s no reason to suffer vision loss from something so easily reversible. We have offered Cataract Treatment Chicago and in Northwest Indiana for over 49 years.

See the difference of award winning eye care and make an appointment today!  Our top priority is your lifelong vision health.

Levin Eye Care Center has proudly served Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland for nearly 50 years and our doctors and team provides the finest quality care to every patient who walks through the door.

Whether we’re administering our award-winning Vision Therapy Program to identify hidden learning-related vision problems or treating and rehabilitating everything from lazy eye to misaligned eyes to visual motor complications from traumatic brain injury.The goal is the same: to provide the quality comprehensive eye exams and superior patient care that leads to visual enjoyment and a higher quality of life.

“We could not have won the honor of Best Vision Care again without our doctors and staff who are committed to excellence and take pride in the care we offer to each patient,” says Dr. Steven Levin, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Indiana Optometric Association in 2021. “And we look forward to continuing to serve the eye care needs of the Region for many years to come.”

Thank you for your continued support and for making Levin Eye Care Center the best eye care center in Northwest Indiana!

Story originally posted in the Northwest Indiana Times Best of the Region 2022 Healthcare 

Understand Why Child Eye Problems Can Go Undiagnosed

Kids are much less likely than adults to recognize that the problems they’re having are because their eyes aren’t working properly. This means they can’t describe what they’re experiencing to adults. Such children will continue to struggle with an undefined obstacle. They might become distracted and fidgety, and an adult might scold them for it, which only makes things worse. All they know is they’re being scolded for not doing as well as their peers, even if they’re trying their hardest.

Healthy eyesight is hugely important to a child’s development and education.

As much as 80% of all learning is visual, and it’s estimated that more than half of childhood learning difficulties come from undiagnosed vision problems. What can parents do to ensure their kids don’t have to struggle with the social and educational disadvantages of an undiagnosed vision problem?

Vision Problems a School Nurse Might Miss

Inability of children to self-report isn’t the only reason a vision problem might go undiagnosed. Another big one is that many of them don’t receive comprehensive eye exams before starting school. School nurses will test students’ visual acuity using the big E chart, but healthy eyesight is a lot more complicated than having 20/20 vision. Here are some vision problems the school nurse will miss:

• Astigmatism. Refractive errors that cause blurry vision but which aren’t always caught in a vision screening. Can lead to amblyopia if not treated with corrective lenses.
• Amblyopia. Also known as “lazy eye,” this means poor vision in one eye due to astigmatism, a difference in refractive errors between the two eyes, or crossed eyes. Can result in irreversible vision loss without treatment.
• Convergence Insufficiency. The eyes drift outward when trying to focus on up-close things, making reading and other close tasks difficult.
• Strabismus. A misalignment of the eyes where they turn out, in, down, or up. Can be corrected by patching, special glasses, or surgery.

Signs Parents Should Watch For

Certain symptoms of child eye problems are very obvious to an observer, like an eye pointing in the wrong direction or frequent squinting. Others need more careful observation. Here are a few signs that would merit a comprehensive eye exam (though we recommend them no matter what):

• Frequent blinking and eye rubbing
• Short attention span, especially for close work
• Difficulty with reading or avoidance of it
• Frequent headaches
• Habit of covering one eye
• Habit of tilting the head to the side
• Tendency to hold reading materials very close to their face
• Difficulty remembering what they just read
• Tendency to lose their place while reading

Why Wait to Schedule Your Child’s Eye Exam?

Every parent wants to give their child the best chance in life, and making sure they don’t have an eye problem that could interfere with their education and development is a big part of that — and one many parents have no way of knowing about! To learn more about eye problems that often go undiagnosed in children, please give us a call!

Healthy eyesight is crucial for a lifelong love of learning!