Do you use your smartphones at night with all the lights switched off, just before going to bed? Who doesn’t, right? Well, there’s bad news for all of us because temporary smartphone blindness is apparently a thing now. Two separate women in the UK made panicked trips to the doctor, fearing a stroke and reporting other symptoms. The diagnosis – one-eyed use of smartphones in the night. The issue, as described in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), is termed ‘Transient Smartphone Blindness’. The article states, “When the patients were seen in our neuro-ophthalmic clinic, detailed history taking revealed that symptoms occurred only after several minutes of viewing a smartphone screen, in the dark, while lying in bed (before going to sleep in the first case and after waking in the second). Both patients were asked to experiment and record their symptoms. They reported that the symptoms were always in the eye contralateral to the side on which the patient was lying.”
A lot of people look at their smartphones at night, using only one eye, with the other usually buried into a pillow. This results in one eye becoming attuned to the light emitted from the smartphone, whereas the other eye is mostly shut and gets accustomed to darkness, causing the temporary loss of sight.
One of the women who reported the said symptoms experienced visual impairment, lasting upto 15 minutes! That’s time enough to think, panic and lose control after realising you’ve suddenely lost your eyesight!
As per the NEJM report, “In a study approved by a research ethics committee, two of the authors monocularly viewed a smartphone screen at arm’s length and quantified the time course of recovery of sensitivity in the dark both psychophysically and electrophysiologically Diminished Retinal Sensitivity after Smartphone Viewing.). Visual sensitivity was appreciably reduced after smartphone viewing, taking several minutes to recover.”
Courtesy: NEJM
The group of doctors who conducted the study also predict that such cases are bound to increase in number because “smartphones are now used nearly around the clock, and manufacturers are producing screens with increased brightness to offset background ambient luminance and thereby allow easy reading.”
Time to keep that smartphone away before sleeping?