A person having difficulty of seeing green, red, blue or a mix of these colors is known to have color blindness. Color blindness is a color vision problem that can lead to a very challenging life for children and oldies. There are rare cases for example where a person sees no color at all. According to statistics, there are as many as 8 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women who have the common form of red-green color blindness for people with Northern European ancestry.

Causes of Color Blindness

Moreover, color blindness is mostly caused by inherited genes that can be present at births or it can be acquired due to aging, eye injuries, eye problems like glaucoma, cataracts, diabetic retinopathy or macular degeneration, or even side effects of medicines. This occurs when a person’s cone cells in the eye lack one of its type or don’t function well. There are three types of cone cells, each of them senses either red, blue or green light. The defect of those cone cells are differentiated by types namely red-green color blindness, blue-yellow color blindness and complete color blindness.   

Symptoms

The symptoms vary to the level of visionary problems. There are people who may be able to see some colors but not the others. For example, they may have difficulty telling the difference between some reds and greens but have no problem seeing blue and yellow. There are also people who can see many colors compared from others and there are some who may only be able to see a few shades of color unlike most people who can see thousands of different shades. Also, some people in rare cases, can only see black, white and gray.

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Diagnosis

Experts normally diagnose people using a set of colored dots and let the person try to find the pattern such as a letter, a shape or a number. Doctors can then identify which colors they have problem with according to the patterns they see. This method is called Ishihara Color Test – the most common test for red-green color blindness. However, there are variety of tests that oculists use like Cambridge Color Test, HRR Pseudoisochromatic Color Test, Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test, Farnsworth Lantern Test and anomaloscope device.

Furthermore, it is highly significant to identify the problem as early as possible as it greatly impacts a person’s life. For children having color vision problems, this can definitely affect their learning abilities and reading development. They will find it difficult to read color-coded information such as bar graphs and pie charts since educational materials are often color-coded. Not only that it affects the lives of the children but it also affects simple daily tasks for adults and limits their career opportunities.

Treatment

Treatments for color vision problems are only available depending on the cause like cataract where it only needs a surgery to remove the cataract and may restore normal color vision. Unfortunately, inherited color blindness cannot be treated. But for the most common type of color blindness, the red-green deficiency, treatment is no longer needed.