A Glance into Color Blindness and Who it Effects

What is Color Blindness?

Color blindness is when the cone and rod cells of the eye don’t contain the various pigments needed to process the light wavelengths into color. Whether its just one pigment missing or multiple pigments, people with color blindness will have trouble seeing colors that those with normal vision can see clearly. Depending on the wavelength of the color itself, some colors for those who are colorblind can be seen clearer than other colors and many of the colors presented can either be mixed in or mistaken for other colors.

What Causes Color Blindness?

Color blindness is mostly caused by genetics passed down from your parents resulting in faulty molecules that lack the ability to detect colors in the retina. However, color blindness can also result from injury to the eye and optic nerve. It can also come from damage to parts of the brain that process color and cataracts can also cause colorblindness by obstructing the eye’s lens.

What Types of Color Blindness Are There?

Color blindness can form in many ways, and for each person, it can be a completely different experience. Here are the technical terms for the various types of color blindness that many people experience:

Red-Green color blindness is when photopigments in your eyes’ red or green cones don’t work properly.

Deuteranomaly: When the green cone photopigment don’t work, resulting in yellow and green looking redder and making it difficult to discern blue from purple.

Protanomaly: When the red cone photopigment doesn’t work, making orange, red, and yellow look greener.

Protanopia: No working red cone cells, making reds look black and making shades of orange, yellow and green look yellow.

Deuteranopia: No working green cone cells, resulting in reds looking a yellow-brown, and greens looking beige

Blue-Yellow color blindness is when the blue cones don’t work properly. As the second most common type, it occurs in these two forms:

Tritanomaly: Your blue cone cells are limited, causing blues to look greener, and making it hard to tell pin from yellow and red.

Tritanopia: When you have no blue cones, making blues look green and yellows look gray or purple.

Lastly, the third type of color blindness is monochromacy, you don’t multiple colors at all and result in hard vison.

Cone monochromacy: This occurs when more than one cone cells don’t work, resulting in faulty vision and nearsightedness.

Rod monochromacy: The most severe form of color blindness, none of the rods and cones work, and the world appears in gray, black, and white, resulting in bright light hurting your eyes.

If you experience any of these conditions, then contact your eye doctor for an eye checkup. Doctors such as Dr. Paul Trapeni have been working with patients with color blindness for over 20 years. His office, The Optical Shoppe in Smyrna, TN, has been helping people find treatment for their color blindness through adjustable contact lenses and eye care treatments. If you’re interested, contact their office today to schedule an appointment.