Can stress cause color blindness?

[Placentia]

What factors can cause color blindness? Can stress be one of the reason for color blindness?

[Mulga]

Strictly speaking, color blindness can not be cured. Color blindness is a vision deficiency to identify specific colors. Studies suggest about eight percent of the world's male population is genetically color blind, while less than one percent of the female population is affected. From this data, we could say stress is the one reason for color blindness. Except this reason, many other causes for this eye problem. Firstly, genetic factor, this condition runs down in families in many times. Secondly, diabetes, leukemia, Multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease can be the reason of color blindness. Thirdly, in some conditions, side effects of more drugs affect our vision. And with the increase of our age, more people may get color blindness easily. Whatever, we should keep a peaceful heart in our life when we face all kinds of problems, this may reduce probability of the color blindness.

[Placer]

Yes, too great stress can sometimes lead to temporary color blindness. Human beings' eyes distinguish different colors by photoreceptors which are on the retina at the back of eye balls. There are two kinds of photoreceptors, rods and cones. The function of rods is to fill the peripheral edges of the retina and the rods only come into power when people are in the conditions of low light. So rods can help people see in darkness, therefore, they do not distinguish color very much. Cones are throughout the retina and they have in themselves pigments that are responsive to some colors. When people see a certain kind of color, the related pigments will respond to the brain so people will know what color it is. The cause of color blindness is that cones misinterpreting the wavelengths of the light coming into the retina so that the pigments wrongly respond to their brain. Certain damages or diseases and aging to eyes will cause color blindness. When people are getting old, the sensitivity of cones to colors will weaken because of macular degeneration, cataracts and so on and so forth.