in today's video I'm gonna be explaining what I floaters are and I'm gonna be
trying to make it as simple as possible to understand here watching Martin's eye
tips with me Martin Oguzie if you are new here welcome to the channel, I'm a uk-based
optometrist and I've been a lot of tourists now for about twenty years
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video so to make this video as simple as possible to understand we're gonna have
a look at first of all what floaters look like they will have a look at where
they appear in the eye and then we'll have a look at why you get them in the
first place now floaters actually appear in a
variety of different forms you may well find that to your floaters may look like
a strand of hair or a particle flies sometimes people describe them and you
may initially find that you're swatting them just trying to get them out of your
way because you don't realize initially that it's actually in your eye and not
outside of your right now when floaters first appear in your vision it's quite a
natural thing to be frightened or scared by what's going on because it just seems
quite an unnatural thing to have these particles in your vision and you know
most people will be concerned about what it means for their vision in the future
and whether it's you know something that's gonna get worse but you know
standard floaters are very common and the fact that you've got one doesn't
mean you're gonna get another one straight away but it is likely that you
may get a few more in the future so be aware of that now within the eyeball is
a large central space and it's this central space that has this special
fluid that we call the vitreous gel or the vitreous humour which is where
floaters appear now the reason that we have this fluid here in the first place
really to serve two main functions first of all it keeps the retina in place
without the fluid in there if there was no fluid in there your retina which is
not firmly held onto the eye may peel off so it helps to kind of just cut a
bit of pressure that keeps everything in place that keeps your blood vessels in
place and stops everything collapsing in it also helps to serve as a shock
absorber from external or outside forces so for example if you poke yourself in
the eye or you know something hits you in the eye then it absorb some of this
impact that that comes and passes through through the eye so it's there as
a protective mechanism so why do we get floaters in the first place
well the vitreous fluid is made 99% out of water and then it's got a 1% which is
a combination of collagen fibres, vitreous cells and also some supporting molecules
as well now to try and simulate and also to just show a little bit more simply
the difference between a normal vitreous and a vitreous which has degenerated a
little bit more and now has floaters I've gone ahead and made up a couple of
mock-ups with fluid inside of a balloon so we have two balloons the first one is
gonna be representing the normal eyeball and with this balloon we can see that
the fluid is nice and firm and the very little movement in if any at all in this
balloon here so as I rotate the balloon around just like the human eye would
rotate around the little bubbles which you might be able to see they don't
really move and the fluid doesn't move therefore any kind of shadows that may
be cast onto the retina is constant and there's in a constantly cast in the same
position on the retina all the time now these little bubbles we can take them to
can represent the collagen fibers which exist in the eye anyway and under normal
circumstances the the kind of molecules that support the vitreous fluid they
help to space out the collagen fibers nice and evenly and allows the eye to
being perfectly transparent without any clumping of the collagen
fibers now the difference in and I would floater what we find is that the fluid
that moves a bit more and you could see the kind of heavy ball that's created
here and that would kind of be like the situation where you've got a string
gauge of or degeneration of some of the supporting molecules and now the fluid
is not really packed out fully in the eye so there's more movement and as a
result you get clumping together of collagen fibers which lead to these
floaters that are more visible and the floaters now because they move around
they cast a shadow onto the retina to the back of the eye that also moves and
easy it's the shadows that become visible to you and become the annoying
floaters that we see so as part of normal aging we're going to get this
disintegration of the fluid the vitreous fluid which leads to more movement in
the eye at least to sticking together of these collagen fibers which then appear
aspects and particles and they're almost like strands of hair and you start to
see that shadow in your eye as they move around you also find that
the the floaters themselves don't tend to move in you know all over the place
they tend to stay within a certain area so you might move your eye to the left
and the shadow kind of follows and trails behind and then input your look
straight ahead and the floater moves back into position as well and that's
because the whole the gel is still relatively stable and everything is
moving within a small area of space so for the most part the age is the main
reason why I'm you're gonna get floaters because of this natural kind of a
shrinkage of the fluid and it's this integration of some of those supporting
molecules that I talked about but you know you can get floaters at a younger
age as well essentially anything that takes your that makes the fluid in your
eye that the vitreous jelly more mobile and you know can can lead to the risk of
you getting floaters and that may be the reason why people who are short-sighted
very highly short-sighted people or people who who don't have
shortsightedness but are young may also get floaters as well so anything that
can cause for example head trauma for example if you're into boxing quite a
lot or you you play a lot of football soccer and you head the ball a lot and
then you could potentially have a situation where you kind of create a
come in can come in a way of the this kind of structure and create motion
within it which then may lead to sites like clumping together of of collagen
and also it can create movement in the collagen which then leads to your
floaters becoming more visible now there's a whole lot we could say about
floaters and we can get into a lot more detail about how it all works and be a
lot more precise about the kind of the biology of it all and the kind of
science involved but I hope you agree that that was you know a fairly
straightforward way to understand how floaters work you know so if you care to
share your experiences with floaters then I'd really love to know in the
comment section whether you've got floaters how long you've had your
floaters for what kind of problems that you might have experienced with with
floaters you know and you know any questions that you might have as well
that might help somebody else or any questions that you might want to throw
at me as well so take care and I'll see you in the next video