It’s easy to assume that being colorblind means living in black-and-white movie time, but that is not how it works at the majority of cases.
How Genetics Affects Your Color Vision?
A recessive gene located on the X chromosome is the principal culprit behind most color blindness, which is the reason why guys are much more likely to be colorblind than women. A girl may have one copy of the gene, but she has no problems seeing the full range of colors since she has a copy of the gene for normal color vision. She and the blindness gene could still pass on to her kids.
Men just have one X chromosome to start with, so they’re colorblind or not, and their daughters will be carriers of this color blindness gene as well. Less than 1 percent of women are, although overall, about eight percent of men are colorblind.
Functioning Color Vision
To understand color blindness, it helps to know how our color vision works. Our color vision comes from specialized cells in our retinas called cones. In a normal color vision, some cones see short (blue), medium (green, and long (red) wavelengths, and they function together that we can differentiate the colors in between. Old TVs and computer screens worked similarly. If you look in their screens, you’ll see pixels with red stripes.
Numerous Kinds of Color Blindness
Color blindness happens when one or more of the kinds of cones is lost or failing to do its job correctly. The most common form is color blindness. Whether the green cones are not working (deuteranomaly) or the red cones (protanomaly), the result is fundamentally the same: a landscape with a great deal of dull, yellowish-brown colors.
Less frequent is blue-yellow color blindness (tritanopia), which is what occurs when the blue cones are the problem. This leaves you in teal, pink, pink, and brown truth. Five percent of colorblind individuals have tritanopia.
The rarest form of color blindness is monochromacy or total color blindness. Finally, that movie idea is accurate. Seeing in grayscale isn’t where it ends for monochromats. Without functioning cones to provide them sharp detail vision, their eyesight may be fuzzy in a manner that glasses can’t mend, and glowing light is often debilitating.
Treatment Is Potential….In Some Instances
Not all color blindness occurs in the same manner, even if the outcome looks the same. If you are dichromatic, this means that your eyes are completely overlooking one of the three cone types, however, if you are an anomalous trichromat, then some of your cones are just responding to a larger range of light wavelengths than they should, overlapping with others.
Anomalous trichromacy is more common than dichromacy, which is good news! If the overlap is not too good, it may be counteracted by wearing special glasses that block wavelengths of light which trigger both kinds of cones, opening up a whole new world of colors!
Are You Or Someone You Know Colorblind?
There are lots of resources available to help people living with color blindness. The very first step is to determine how intense the color blindness is and what type it is. Schedule a consultation with us so we can assist you to get exactly what you need to make things simpler!
Your lifelong eyesight health is the top priority!
