Teen 'Blasts Away' Parts of Retina by Staring Into a Pet's Laser Pointer
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Teen 'Blasts Away' Parts of Retina by Staring Into a Pet's Laser Pointer:
The device used was a laser pointer toy intended for exercising pets. While devices like this are often advertised as being low-power lasers, that's now[sic] always the case, and mounting evidence of retinal damage caused by such pointers suggests the risk is growing, researchers say, even though people might not be aware of it.
[...] Despite only looking at the laser directly for a matter of seconds, immediately afterwards he experienced a form of vision loss for several minutes, after describing the initial visual effect as a bright light.
Five months after the incident, the boy, experiencing ongoing blurred vision and partial vision loss in his right eye, went to see OSU ophthalmologist Frederick Davidorf.
At the time, the boy said he sometimes couldn't see individual letters when reading text with his right eye (with his left eye closed). At that point, tests revealed visual acuity was slightly diminished in his right eye, but presented as normal in his left eye.
On a subsequent visit six months later, his visual acuity was found to have improved to a normal level in both eyes, but that seemingly positive result didn't reflect the harm done inside the eye.
Using a high-resolution optical scanning system, Davidorf saw first-hand the damage done to the boy's retinas, where entire regions of light-sensitive photoreceptors cells (aka rods and cones) had been "blasted away" by the laser, as Davidorf puts it.
"There's just nothing left there," Davidorf says. "The affected areas are devoid of cones."
Journal Reference:
Vitellas, Carol BA; Doble, Nathan PhD; Wells-Gray, et al. Cone Photoreceptor Integrity assessed with Adaptive Optics Imaging after Laser-Pointer-Induced Retinal Injury Retinal Cases and Brief Reports, (DOI: 10.1097/ICB.0000000000001025)
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