Acute Retinal Necrosis

I was reading an article this week that was a summary of Acute Retinal Necrosis. ARN, as it is abbreviated, is definitely one of the scariest diagnoses that I have come across. It isn’t all that common, but it’s not exceedingly rare either. It is a devastating retinal disease that can progress in a matter of days and can affect otherwise healthy individuals. See what I mean when I say it is scary? It made me think of floaters as a symptom that could potentially be overlooked by the people out in our communities. I think that the really important take home message in thinking about ARN and floaters is that decreased vision and floaters as a combination of symptoms is much more concerning than the report of floaters alone. We often say that seeing handful of floaters is a relatively common and benign experience, which is basically true, but it is definitely not benign to have blurry vision in addition to a handful of floaters. Of course, any larger number of floaters carries risk as well. I always encourage everyone to take seriously any episodes of blurry vision that last longer than just a few minutes, and this article reinforces the need to think about and ask about blurry vision whenever anyone reports any ocular symptoms of any kind.