“The human retina doesn't regenerate, so when there's interruption of blood flow, the retina die,” says Mathieu Bakhoum, M.D., a retina surgeon at UC San Diego Health.

If you do have signs of plaques, an ophthalmologist will order imaging or send you to your primary care doctor.Īnd, while diagnostic methods are still being studied, your eyes can also display evidence of ischemia - decreased blood flow due to heart disease. They can cause a stroke if they reach the brain. “Sometimes we can see little plaque deposits inside the eye that have broken away from buildup on the carotid artery, which supplies most of the blood supply to the brain,” Stagg says. Heart diseaseīecause the health of your eye is connected to the health of your heart, eye exams can detect a number of cardiovascular conditions, including clogged arteries, often before the patient even knows there's a problem.

When someone has high blood pressure over a long period of time, the arteries of the retina may stiffen, and cause bulging in the eye when pressed against a blood vessel (something called arteriovenous nicking). “But it can also be associated with high blood pressure.” That might present itself as a tiny blood vessel that breaks in the white of the eye and leaks blood (a subconjunctival hemorrhage).Īnother sign of underlying hypertension, says Skondra, is “a little bit of swelling” in the eye. “Most bleeding in the eye is harmless, sometimes caused by coughing or sneezing too hard,” says Dimitra Skondra, M.D., associate professor of ophthalmology and visual science at the University of Chicago. Here, some health conditions doctors can discover: 1. “I can see blood vessels and nerve tissue that actually runs all the way to the brain.”

'An eye exam is one of the few exams where, without doing blood tests, invasive imaging or surgery, we can actually look inside the body,” says Brian Stagg, M.D., an ophthalmologist and retina specialist at the University of Utah's John A. En español | The benefits of annual appointments with your ophthalmologist go well beyond keeping your eyes in working order: A close inspection of the lens, retina and optic nerve can reveal a host of systemic disorders - high blood pressure and diabetes among them - sometimes before other symptoms become evident.

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