Use of mobile phones in the dark can lead to temporary blindness

Recently two cases of temporary blindness were reported in the UK that were due to smartphone use at night in a dark room.

The condition is called transient smartphone blindness, say doctors, who reported a case of two women in the UK suffering from reduced vision temporarily in one eye after looking at a bright mobile phone screen in a dark room.

In the first case, a 22-year-old woman had trouble seeing with her right eye at night while in bed. This happened many times a week for a year. However, her vision was fine in the left eye, and in both eyes the following day .

In the other case, a 40-year-old woman was not able to see with one eye when she woke up in the morning. The vision disturbance continued for about 15 minutes, and happened on and off for six months.

In both cases, doctors later found that the vision problems occured only after the women had viewed their smartphone for several minutes, while lying on their side in bed, reported ‘Live Science’.

The doctors said that these problems happened because the patients were looking at their phone, in darkness, with just one eye, while the other eye was blocked by a pillow when they were lying down.

‘As they can see well with the dark-adapted eye, it seems to them that they have lost vision in the eye which – a moment ago – was viewing the smartphone normally,’ researchers wrote.

In an experiment, the patients were asked to look at their phone with both eyes, and also with each eye individually. The patients said they did not experience symptoms when looking at their phone with both eyes, and if they looked at their phone with one eye, the symptoms were always in the eye that had been viewing the smartphone.

Avoid using the smartphone in the darkness of a night; emergencies excused!