The other thing that was a little bit disturbing was I have a druse, which is
the singular for drusen. In other words, I'm starting some of that diabetic or
age-related eye disease. So I just got back from the optometrist. For
a doc that does prevention, I shouldn't admit it it's been like four or five
years. Here's the good news - my distance vision has improved to where I don't
really need distance glasses anymore. Bad news is that I need something for
reading, and I knew that my readings getting worse and worse. I bought an iPad
recently because I can't read books on my iPhone anymore. The other thing that
was a little bit disturbing was I have a druse, which is the singular for drusen.
In other words, I'm starting some of that diabetic or age-related eye disease. I'll
show you in just a second. So Dr. Myer, what did you see on my test? First of all,
what tests were these? So this is a wide-angle shot of your retina. This is
called an optic disc, but what we're looking here is a picture of the back of
your left eye. These are your eyelashes, but this is the optic nerve, the cable
that connects the eye to the brain, the blood vessels, and the whole things the
retina. So a traditional dilation, we shine bright lights and looking for
any holes or tears or breaks the retina. So we don't see signs of anything like
that. Then we look at the optic nerve, the cable that connects to the brain, the
blood vessels, and then the center part of the retina is the macula. It's
responsible for the center part of the vision so with some issues with diabetes
and high blood pressure, it can cause damage to these blood vessels and cause
them to bleed and leak fluid. Did you know this diabetic retinopathy? So in
your case, in your macula, the center part of the retina, we do see this little
lipid deposit which is known as a drusen. These can sometimes be seen in people
with macular degeneration. Now we took another scan of the eye,
OCT, which does a hi-def look at the macula. So could you point out that drusen
with the very sort of yellowish sort of drusen or a single would be a druse. But
okay, but the macula here the center part has the highest concentration of cones
and the photoreceptors that are responsible for high vision, and that's
why it's sort of dark green pigment. Now the other scan looks at sort of a
cross-section of the retina and of the macula. And normally, it has a little
fold. This is called an OCT (optical tomography). All have a lots
of compositor. Yeah, communicate to me. Hey, you got it so
normally it has a little sort of dip to it. So these are all the layers of the
retina. So looking at that druse, we can see here a little bump right there. And
like I said, sometimes this lumpy, bumpy appearance can be associated with
age-related macular degeneration. But in general, I think it has the normal
contour and the average thickness for someone your age. But this is definitely
a spot where when I'm going to keep an eye on that. This progresses... it can cause
vision loss and issues. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Myer. Well, thank you
for coming in. So there you have it. Spite the fact that I'm doing a lot to control,
this disease process, macular degeneration,
age-related eye disease, AREDS, all of these diseases are similar to diabetes,
they are a slow progression of a disease. And the trick here, the goal is to slow
it down as much as much as possible and in some cases even reverse it. Thank you
very much for your interest.
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