Excessive screen time can not only damage your eyes, but also the rest of your body’s processes, it can even shorten your lifespan, experts warn.
Researchers at the Buck Institute, a non-profit organization in the Bay Area that are researching issues related to aging and age-related diseases, have found that exposure to light in the eyes can alter the rhythm. circadian and, as a result, cause or worsen chronic disease.
Because the eyes are constantly exposed to the outside world, unlike many other organs, their immune defenses are more active. Hyperactive defenses can disrupt the body’s internal processes and, as a result, cause damage to other organs.
As screen time increases among almost all humans, a natural part of the digital world, researchers warn that excessive exposure to light every day can have disastrous long-term consequences.
The researchers found that excessive exposure to light can not only damage a person’s eyes, but can also alter the circadian rhythms of the body’s cells and even shorten their lifespan (archive photo )
“Looking at computer and telephone screens and being exposed to light pollution late into the night are very disturbing conditions for circadian clocks,” said Dr. Pankaj Kapahi, a professor and nutrition expert at the institute. press release.
“It affects the protection of the eye and this could have consequences beyond vision, damaging the rest of the body and the brain.”
The research team notes that previous research has found a correlation between general poor health and eye disorders.
One example is diabetic retinopathy, which is responsible for some 3.9 million cases of blindness worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Dr. Pankaj Kapahi (pictured) warns that excessive use of electronics such as cell phones can have a real negative impact on a person’s life.
The disease is formed as a complication of diabetes, where high blood sugar levels cause damage to parts of the eye and eventually lead to blindness.
In general, these examples work from head to toe, however, with body problems that cause vision problems as an auxiliary effect.
Researchers at the Buck Institute found that some trends can go in the opposite direction, but eye health affects almost every cell in the body.
‘We always think of the eye as something that serves us, to provide vision. We don’t think of it as something that needs to be protected to protect the whole organism, ”Kapahi said
Dr. Brian Hodge, a high school researcher, explains that every cell in the body works with a circadian clock.
These watches operate in 24-hour cycles, they have been evolutionarily adjusted to cope with the daily day-night cycle.
Almost every cell in the body operates in this cycle in one way or another, which affects every bodily function.
The circadian rhythms of many people are changing, however, as the stressors of life, the use of devices and other factors make people sleep less now than before.
Light, in particular, can further disrupt these cycles.
Researchers say that the eyes become inflamed when exposed to light, a normal process of the body for the organs facing the outside world.
Where problems arise are when the eyes are inflamed for too long, which can cause or worsen some chronic diseases.
Kapahi and Hodge discovered this when they participated in research on fruit flies to see how exposure to food, light, and other factors would affect their life and bodily processes.
Dr. Brian Hodge (pictured) explains that every cell in the body works at a circadian rhythm of some kind, which can be interrupted by light.
“The fruit fly has such a short shelf life, which makes it a really beautiful model that allows us to examine many things at once,” Hodge said.
A group of flies split into two groups. One was allowed an unrestricted diet, while the other was only allowed to consume about ten percent of the daily protein as the opposite group.
This led researchers to discover the cyclical nature of some of these hormones, how they worked, and how they changed their activities throughout the day.
The team found that the genes that were most activated in diet-restricted flies were related to light-responsive photoreceptors in the eye.
Subsequent research found that flies that remained in the dark lived longer lives than their companions, indicating that impacts on the circadian cycle may have negative effects on the useful life of humans.
This is especially worrying news coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, where screen time has increased tremendously, especially among teens who now stare at screens for twice as long as before the virus sent many activities to the Internet. inland in early 2020.