Wear sunglasses now to protect your eyes for life

Sunglasses seem to fall into the category of “Things I wish I had known when I was younger.” Apparently, exposure to the sun when you’re in your 20s and 30s can lead to pretty serious eye problems later in life. 

In my 20s and 30s, I couldn’t really be bothered to wear sunglasses unless they somehow enhanced my groovy outfit of the day. And while I’m not yet at the point where I’m suffering from glaucoma or macular degeneration, I’m beginning to worry about it. 

Harvard Medical School has an excellent website at www.health.harvard.edu, and one of the featured stories this week recommends that you treat your eyes with the same care as you treat your skin. You wouldn’t let your children go out and play all day in the hot sun without sunscreen (presumably),  and you really shouldn’t let them stay out without sunglasses either.

Of course, as a parent, I know that it’s as hard to keep sunglasses on a child as it is to keep a hat on a child; and I know that the chances of a single pair of sunglasses making it through the summer without getting lost, horribly scratched or crushed is pretty much next to nil. 

I am the last person in the world to give parenting advice so I won’t even pretend to have insight into how to overcome this hurdle. The woman who wrote the Harvard Health article claims she solved the problem by allowing her son to go to the store and choose his glasses. Sure. I bet that worked, and I bet those glasses made it all the way through to August. 

But let’s not be defeatist. In theory, it’s possible to train youngsters to wear hats and sunglasses and thank goodness, because the sun exposure they get will come back to haunt them later in life, according to the Harvard Health article.

This is particularly true for outdoorsy youngsters. 

“If you spend time near the water, the beach, or snow, the sunlight bounces off of those surfaces and right into the eyes,” said Dr. Louis Pasquale, a doctor at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He is cited in the article. 

It’s believed that exposure when we’re in our teens, 20s and 30s leads to problems later on, and the theory shared in this Harvard Health article is that too much sun leads to exfoliation syndrome (little particles or flakes or matter float loose and clog up your eyes).

The author of the article (Harvard Health Letter Executive Editor Heidi Godman) says  “exfoliation syndrome is the most common identifiable cause of secondary open-angle glaucoma and secondary closed-angle glaucoma.”

She says it’s also “linked to cataracts and possibly to macular degeneration.”