Smoking is bad for everything!

In the November 2022 edition of the journal Ophthalmology, Dr. Golnoush Mahmoudinezhad and colleagues published a study that indicated that heavy smokers with glaucoma are more likely to lose visual field than non-smokers.

Glaucoma is a disease the affects the optic nerve in the eye and causes loss of side vision before central vision. That’s why glaucoma is often depicted as progressive “tunnel” vision–as the side vision is lost and the center is relatively spared, the tunnel vision effect occurs. So, as glaucoma progresses, the amount of side vision that is lost, i.e. the loss of visual field, is a key factor in determining severity.

This study suggests that heavy smokers have more of that progression. This basically means that heavy smokers get worse glaucoma. This is yet another disease that we may add to the list of those that get worse with smoking.