Seeing double
Macular degeneration increases the risk of dying from heart attack and stroke.
Macular degeneration just got a whole lot scarier.
As if the threat of going blind isn’t bad enough, new research shows that people with this disease are at higher risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke than people with good vision. And not just slightly higher risk over the course of a lifetime, either: We’re talking more than DOUBLE — in a matter of just a few years after being diagnosed.
Researchers started out by examining the eye health of more than 3,600 volunteers ages 49 and over. Five years later, they performed follow-up exams on over 2,300 of the original subjects. And five years after that, they conducted a final screening on nearly 2,000 of the participants.
When they compared the number of participants who had died during the study to the number of macular degeneration cases, they discovered that being diagnosed with the eye disease more than doubled the risk of dying from a heart attack or stroke within the next 10 years. And that grim statistic was just for the cases that were caught early. People who had late-stage macular degeneration at the outset of the study were five times as likely to die from a heart attack and 10 times as likely to die from a stroke within the following decade.
So it appears that keeping your eyes healthy may do much more than save you from “coke bottle” glasses — it may save your life.
The good news is, Dr. Wright has a wealth of information for protecting your vision. In fact, the December 2000 and February 2005 issues of Nutrition & Healing both feature lead articles on halting — and sometimes even reversing — macular degeneration. Subscribers can download and view these issues for free by visiting www.wrightnewsletter.com and logging on to the Archives portion of the website with the username and password listed on page 8 of your most recent issue.
Source:
“Degenerative eye disease more than doubles heart attack and stroke risk,” ScienceDaily (www.sciencedaily.com), 3/1/08
