Could an eye test spot a brain tumour or the risk of a stroke?
When you sit down for an eye test, your optometrist is checking far more than whether you need new glasses. The back of your eye is one of the few places in your body where blood vessels, and a nerve that runs straight to your brain, can be seen without a scan or a cut. That is why, in a routine test, your optometrist can pick up the signs of high blood pressure, raised cholesterol and heart disease, the risk of a stroke, and in some cases a brain tumour. For millions of people, the test is free.
What your optometrist can see at the back of your eye
Swelling where the optic nerve joins the back of your eye can be a sign of raised pressure inside the head, which is one way a brain tumour can first come to light. Narrowed or kinked blood vessels can be a sign of high blood pressure, and a tiny blockage in one of them can be an early warning of a stroke. Your optometrist looks for all of this as part of the same test, often with a photograph of the back of your eye that you can see on the screen for yourself.
Why 14.5 million of us are putting off our eye tests
A survey of 5,001 adults for this year’s National Eye Health Week, which ran from 21 to 27 September, found that 14.5 million people in the UK are missing routine sight tests. Four in ten of them say it is because their eyes are fine, and one in six people surveyed said worry about the cost was stopping them. Many of the conditions an optometrist looks for cause no pain and no blurring in the early stages, so you can see perfectly well while they develop. “Half of sight loss in the UK is avoidable,” said David Cartwright, chair of Eye Health UK, which ran the survey.
Who can get a free eye test
For a great many people, the NHS pays. In England, a sight test is free if you are 60 or over, if you have diabetes or glaucoma, or if you are 40 or over and a parent, brother, sister or child has glaucoma. It is also free if you are registered as partially sighted or blind, for children under 16, for people aged 16 to 18 in full-time education, and for people on certain benefits. The rules are much the same in Wales and Northern Ireland, and in Scotland eye tests are free for everyone. The NHS website has the full list of who can get a free eye test, and the advice is to have one every two years, unless your optometrist tells you otherwise.
The clocks go back on Sunday 25 October
At 2am that Sunday the clocks go back an hour, and for most of the winter after that the sun sets before five o’clock. From then on, most of your evening reading happens by lamplight, which makes October a good month to have your eyes checked, and to take a look at the light you read by as well.
How British Summer Time began
British Summer Time turned 110 this year, and it began with a builder from Kent called William Willett. Riding his horse home through Petts Wood one morning in the early 1900s, he noticed how many houses still had their blinds and curtains drawn, even though it was already light. He paid to print a pamphlet called The Waste of Daylight, which proposed putting the clocks forward by 80 minutes in April, in four steps of 20 minutes, and back again in the same way in September.
An MP called Robert Pearce took the idea to the House of Commons in 1908, without success, and Willett died of flu in 1915, at 58, without seeing it become law. Parliament only brought it in during the First World War, when the country needed to save coal. Germany had already moved its clocks, and Britain’s went forward for the first time on 21 May 1916. In Petts Wood today there is a memorial sundial to Willett, set permanently to summer time.
Britain has tried other arrangements since. During the Second World War the clocks went two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time in summer, and from 1968 to 1971 they stayed an hour ahead all winter, until the House of Commons voted to end the experiment. In March we looked at whether the clocks might stop changing altogether, in Will the clocks stop changing?
What the darker evenings mean for your reading
At 60 your eyes need about three times the light they did at 20, and the quality of that light matters as much as the amount. An ordinary bulb only looks white. It is built on a blue chip that leaves gaps across the colours of daylight, so your eyes work to fill them in, and small print takes more effort than it does by a window on a clear morning.
A Serious Light puts up to 12x more light on your page than a 60W bulb, and its Daylight Wavelength Technology™ gives you the full spectrum of daylight without those gaps, so small print is as clear in the evening as it is by a window. You can try one at home for up to 90 days, and 99 in 100 people keep theirs for the difference it makes.