Eye woes a problem for women more than for men

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 plague 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.

An estimated 2.7 million American women older than 40 have low vision or are blind, according to NIH’s National Eye Institute. Yet an estimated threequarters of cases are preventable or correctable, according to Women’s Eye Health, an educational organization of eye disease researchers.

Women are especially prone to dry eye disease, age-related macular degeneration, glaucoma, cataracts and Fuchs corneal endothelial dystrophy, in which a layer of cells on the inner part of the cornea die, causing vision to become cloudy or hazy.

Experts don’t know why women seem to be more vulnerable than men to eye disorders. They speculate hormones are involved because many eye diseases occur after menopause, dry eye in particular. But there is no evidence that shows a link.