Smoking and Macular Degeneration

Smoking Can Increase Blindness Risk

By Jordan Lite ~ From AOL Health

Note: will the reasons to quit smoking never stop coming? Maybe the reasons not too will soon!

You probably knew that smoking causes Lung Cancer and raises your risk of heart disease, but did you know that it also increases your chances of going blind?

New research from UCLA shows that smoking continues to take its toll even when we're old and gray. Age-related mascular degeneration occurs more than five times more often among female smokers over 80-years-old compared to non-smoking women of the same age. AMD is the leading cause of blindness in the West and is two to three times more common among smokers than nonsmokers, according to Alliance International. Age is the biggest risk factor for AMD, which occurs when the macula -- an area of the retina in the back of the eye that processes fine detail -- is damaged.

"The damage from smoking is cumulative over time," said Michael Rosenberg, M.D., chairman of ophthalmology at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. "The older you get, the higher the risk for AMD itself, regardless of smoking. That combined with more time smoking increases your risk."

Overall, nearly a third of the nearly 2,000 women in the study -- published in the January issue of the American Journal of Ophthalmology -- had AMD. Study co-author Anne Coleman, M.D., didn't immediately respond to a call and emails from Aol Health seeking comment. But in a UCLA-issued press release, she noted that while the risk of AMD was slightly higher overall among women over 80-years-old than among those in their late 70s, "the rate was dramatically higher in older women who smoked."

While the association between AMD and smoking isn't new, most research has been done on people 75 and younger, Coleman said in the release. In this study, Coleman followed 1,958 women beginning at age 78. Doctors snapped photos of their retinas every five years. Among all women in the study, those who smoked had 11 percent higher rates of AMD than women who didn't.

Smoking may increase the risk of AMD by decreasing blood and oxygen flow to the eye, by reducing pigment -- or color -- in the retina or by promoting mini-clots there, according to a 2005 study published in Eye. The good news is quitting can really save your sight. That study found that former smokers have only a slightly higher risk of AMD than people who never smoked and the risk evens out the longer a person goes without lighting up.
An estimated 1.75 million Americans have AMD, and the number is expected to hit 2.95 million by 2020 as the U.S. population ages, according to the National Eye Institue.

"There are many reasons to stop smoking, but this is another one," Rosenberg said.