While many individuals living with colour vision deficiencies (also known as colour blindness) may believe that full-colour vision is beyond their reach, recent technological advances are helping colour blind individuals see the world in a new light.

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What is Colour Blindness?

Our eyes use two types of specialized cells for vision: rods and cones. The cone cells are located in the macula and are responsible for detecting colour, and each cone cell is programmed to detect either red, green, or blue light and send that information to our brains.

Colour blindness is a condition that occurs in individuals who have an imbalance in the light-sensitive pigments that detect one of the three colours or don’t have enough functional cones to detect all three colours equally. Colour blindness causes our brains to misinterpret two distinct colours as one colour, resulting in visual confusion.

Who is Affected By Colour Blindness?

Colour blindness affects millions of people across the globe. Men are significantly more likely to experience colour blindness ( a 1 in 12 chance) as opposed to women ( a 1 in 200 chance). Most individuals with colour blindness can see colour but are not able to easily differentiate between select colours.

Individuals with red-green colour blindness often have trouble differentiating between shades of red or green, both of which appear as a muddy brown colour. This may occur because their red and green sensing cones have more overlap than usual.

Take the EnChroma Colour Vision Test

Do you suspect that you might have colour blindness? A colour vision test could help determine if your colour vision is deficient.

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Colour Blindness Treatments at Central Optometry

EnChroma

Individuals with an imbalance in their functional cone types (typically related to red and green colour deficiencies) can achieve full-colour vision using EnChroma spectacle lenses. These unique lenses use multi-notch filtering to block out the light wavelengths that cause visual confusion, helping the brain differentiate between two different colours by tricking the cones into responding to the two different types of light differently.

EnChroma lenses are specially designed to reduce or even eliminate red-green colour blindness. 80% of individuals with red-green colour blindness who use EnChroma lenses report a significant improvement in their colour perception abilities.

Do you think that you might benefit from EnChroma lenses? Ask your optometrist during your next appointment.

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