At first, it felt like something was in her eye. Then her eyes turned red, watery and irritated. Her vision became blurry, and she found it difficult to read. It was painful to fly, and to be in air conditioning. Ilene Gipson, a scientist who studies eye disorders, didn't need a specialist to tell her what she had. "I knew what it was," she says.
Gipson had dry eye disease, an ailment that occurs when the eye does not produce enough tears, or when the tears evaporate too quickly. It is the most common eye problem that older women experience, and it disproportionately affects women: more than 3 million women vs. about 1.7 million men, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
And it's not the only one. Many eye disorders — some of them quite serious — seem to favor women over men.
"Women make up two-thirds of the people who are visually impaired or blind in the world," says Janine Clayton, an ophthalmologist who heads the office of research on women's health at the National Institutes of Health. "Most people would say, 'That can't be the case in the United States.' But it is. Unfortunately, we don't know why."
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/vision-problems--dry-eye-among-them--affect-more-women-than-men/2017/10/13/02c121d6-a79f-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html?
