Bad habit that loses your sight!!!!

It seems that smoking will affect not only your sense of smell and taste, but also your eyesight, as a new study has shown that exposure to a chemical element in cigarette smoke may make it more difficult to see in conditions of lower luminance such as poor lighting, fog or bright light.

The researchers wrote in the "Gamma" journal of ophthalmology that the presence of higher levels of cadmium in the blood is associated with a reduced sense of image contrast.

"This particular aspect of vision is really important because it affects your ability to see the end of a rim or insert a key into a lock in low light," said lead study author Adam Paulson of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine in Madison.

He added, "It is something that there is no way to fix it currently, unlike visual acuity, which can be easily treated with glasses or contact lenses."

He added that smoking can increase cadmium levels, as does eating green leafy vegetables and shellfish. He explained that it may be possible to eat these vegetables while avoiding cadmium if the vegetables have not been exposed to pesticides.

The two heavy metals, lead and cadmium, accumulate in the retina, a layer of neurons that senses light and sends signals to the brain, Paulson said.

The researchers tested the eyes of volunteers to measure contrast sensitivity. But instead of making the letters smaller, the test involved gradually reducing the contrast between the letter color and the background.

At the start of the study, none of the 1983 volunteers had any deficiency in contrast sensitivity. After 10 years, the researchers found that nearly a quarter of the volunteers had experienced some reduction in eye contrast sensitivity, and that this reduction was related to cadmium levels, but not lead.

But Paulson said that doesn't necessarily mean that lead doesn't affect contrast sensitivity. "This may be because in our study there was not enough exposure to lead (in volunteers) and another study might find an association between them," he added.