Dry eyes are a very common chronic eye condition among women in perimenopause and beyond. Here's why you shouldn't ignore it.
There are lots of changes we expect as we get older, more gray hairs, more wrinkles, a little less flexibility. Not me. Everyone else that gets older, but not me. Some symptoms, though, might take us by surprise. Take, for example, dry eyes. Turns out this chronic eye condition is very common, especially among women in perimenopause and beyond. Here's NPR's Maria Godoy.
MARIA GODOY, BYLINE: Earlier this year, Hilda Hernandez Nash (ph) was driving to work one morning when she noticed her eyes suddenly felt gritty and uncomfortable.
HILDA HERNANDEZ NASH: All of a sudden, I couldn't tolerate my contacts. My eyes just felt like they were sandpaper.
GODOY: Within days, her eyes became red, watery and swollen.
HERNANDEZ NASH: There was a point in time where my eyes felt like they couldn't focus. And I just didn't want to open my eyes. I couldn't tolerate light.
GODOY: At first, Hernandez Nash, who's in her late 40s, thought she might have some form of pink eye. But when she saw an eye doctor, she learned her symptoms all pointed to dry eyes, a condition many women experience as they enter perimenopause and beyond. Research suggests around half of all women in the menopausal transition years have symptoms.
LAUREN GORMLEY: Dry eye is incredibly common.
GODOY: Lauren Gormley is an optometrist with the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University. While men get dry eyes, too…
GORMLEY: Large-scale studies have shown that the rate of dry eye in women over 50 is double the rate of dry eye in men over 50.
GODOY: Gormley says the condition occurs when your eyes can't produce enough tears or your tears don't work correctly. And one of the most common causes is a problem with the oil glands in the eyelids that keep tears from drying up too fast.
GORMLEY: The oil can be ineffective, the oil volume can be too low, the oil could be too thick. Or the oil could not be able to be released into the tear film. And that is where the connection comes in to menopause.
GODOY: That's because sex hormones, in particular, androgens, help regulate oil production in these glands. As androgen levels decline with age and menopause, the oil glands in eyes produce less and lower quality oil.
GORMLEY: Which then leads to faster evaporation of the tears and then increased inflammation of the ocular surface, which is really what dry eye is.
GODOY: Kelly Nichols is dean of the School of Optometry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She says lots of other factors can also contribute to dry eyes.
