I have uneven eyes.
My left eye seems to be more protruded outwards than the right eye.
Can this be made even?
Thank you for your question!
You submitted a photo and a question saying that your eyes are uneven and that one eye
is more protuberant or bulging than the other eye.
And you’re asking what can be done for that.
Well, unfortunately, with the limited information of your question, I have to ask more questions
to get a better detail in way to help you understand the best choice of what to do.
I’ll explain to you a little bit of what I mean.
I’m a cosmetic oculofacial plastic surgeon.
I’ve been practicing in Manhattan and Long Island for over 20 years.
This means that my background training was first in eye surgery before I did specialized
training in oculoplastic or oculofacial plastic surgery.
This is surgery of the eyelids, the orbit, the bones around the eyes and the space of
the eye socket, the lacrimal system and the face.
So dealing with eyes that bulge is a significant part of what is the specialty of oculofacial
plastic surgeon.
The most common issue that we deal with is something called thyroid eye disease.
Now thyroid eye disease is a condition and I’m not saying that this is your situation
for you but it’s important to learn about the causes of an eye being bulging.
But thyroid eye disease being the most common in terms of just a general number of possible
causes is a disease where the a certain antibodies will actually cause the thyroid hormones to
change as well as the position and appearance of the eyes to change.
It’s also referred to as Graves' disease.
Now going back to the question you submitted, the first thing I would ask you in my practice
would be if this is a change.
Has this been different to when you looked a year ago or two years ago or 5 years ago.
If this is a change, then you need to see an ophthalmologist as soon as you possibly
can.
It’s very important to at least make the right diagnosis because a change in the eye
position or the eyeball position is something that needs to be evaluated.
Usually that goes with some type of an imaging study like a CT scan, CAT scan or MRI study
because we always want to rule out some kind of mass and it can be benign or malignant
as well as conditions such as thyroid eye disease.
Now let’s say for argument’s sake that this has been a stable appearance, then it’s
possible that the shape of your eyeball is a longer shape.
It’s commonly seen in people with very hyperopia or very nearsighted.
The eyeball, instead of being, more of an egg shape is more of like a football shape.
But again, it goes back to the history of the symptoms and doing a proper ophthalmic
examination.
Ophthalmic examination would include getting vision and testing as well as look inside
and behind the eye as well as taking some measurements of relative projection of the
eyes and other things that can be done without looking at a photo.
So I think you need to educate yourself about these causes, schedule an appointment with
an ophthalmologist to get the diagnosis.
I can tell you that we have done a lot of treatment of patients with thyroid eye disease
and just an example, and we would be able to do things as minimal as doing eyelid surgery
to reposition the eyelids to make the eyes look more symmetric to doing something like
orbital decompression to get the eyes to go inward.
Again, these are all contingent or proper diagnosis.
So we don’t need to get ahead of ourselves at this point but at least education and some
knowledge and insight as this being a change and then getting the first line of evaluation
is very important so that you can have a plan at some point of what will work out best for
you.
So I hope that was helpful, I wish you the best of luck and thank you for your question!