Color Blindness

What is it?

Color blindness, also known as daltonism, is a deficiency in the view of certain colors. Our retina is made up of rods and cones, which act as color and light receptors. Each of the millions of cones are made up of 3 more receptors: red, green and blue. When functioning correctly, we can see all types of color; color blindness occurs when there is a problem or lack of a color receptor in the cones. Red/green color distortion is the most common type of color vision impairment. In a few very rare cases, some people can only see in black and white shades.

 

What causes it?

Color blindness is almost always an inherited condition although males are more likely than females to get it. Cones in our eye contain red, green and blue pigments. When there is damage to one of the cones or a cone is missing some of the pigment, color blindness occurs.

 

Symptoms

	1.		inability to distinguish colors (usually red/green and sometimes yellow/blue)

A color blind person may not see the digit 8 in the picture below.

 

Treatment

For some color blind people, special contacts to can with color vision. Unfortunately, there is not a treatment to completely cure color blindness.

 

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