Natural skin care treatment is one of many concerns as the nutrients in our foods are attacked by yet another source.
Skin Care News
Tag Archives: affect
Don’t let high blood pressure affect your vision
An eye examination can prove beneficial to more than just your eye health. Conditions such as diabetes, arthritis, and excessive levels of cholesterol can all be spotted during an optician’s routine checks. Whilst this is hugely beneficial for catching irregularities that have gone by unnoticed, it also highlights the risk that other aspects of your general health can pose on your eyesight. One of the most common of these dangers comes with high blood pressure. Here, we outline how this affects your eye health and how it can be treated.
How blood pressure affects the eyes
If you have high blood pressure, it is crucial that you have regular eye examinations as the disease can often show no symptoms until in its latter stages. These symptoms may include double vision and headaches. If the blood pressure shows at the back of the eye, your optometrist, with the help of our specialist retinal imaging equipment, will be able to observe signs such as spots on the retina, a swelling of the central retina (known as the macula) and small areas of bleeding in the back of the eye. These signs are commonly known as Hypertensive Retinopathy. High blood pressure also increases the risk of stroke and cardiac arrest.
Preventing and reversing the effects of Hypertensive Retinopathy
The lowering and the control of your blood pressure is the mainstay treatment for Hypersensitive Retinopathy, which will allow the retina to heal itself over a period of a few months. Your doctor may prescribe you medication to help with this, but there are plenty of things you can do to lower it yourself. Make an effort to maintain a healthy diet with a regular exercise routine to boost your general fitness. Reducing your stress levels also plays an important part, as chronic stress is an important contributor to high blood pressure.
Always remember that high blood pressure affects all aspects of your health, including your eyes. Many expert optometrists such as those at Leightons for example can provide appropriate treatment and advice to anyone with concerns regarding eyecare, so it was worth contacting for further advice.
How a skin condition like psoriasis can affect your body image and what to do about it
Your body image is how you perceive yourself when you look at your reflection in the mirror or when you think about the way you look. How accurately your body image matches the way others actually see you is dependent on many factors such as gender, media and cultural influences and illness.
Having a skin condition like psoriasis, vitiligo or eczema will most definitely affect your body image. It’s important because a negative body image is associated with an increased risk of depression, low self-esteem, eating disorders and even suicide.
In people with psoriasis, a negative body image can have even more adverse consequences. In 2014, researchers at Copenhagen University Hospital interviewed 8 people with psoriasis to see how the condition affected body image. They found a link between a negative body image and increased tendency to cover up, sexual inhibitions and reduced exercise.
Research in the general population suggests body image is remarkably stable throughout life, despite changes in appearance as we age. When you have a skin condition like psoriasis your physical appearance can change drastically from month to month. Sometimes your condition may be in remission but even then it’s likely your body image will remain negative rather than improving as your skin does.
Research tells us that people who develop psoriasis later in life are far less likely to be affected by anxiety, stress and depression than those who were diagnosed in their teens and one theory for this is their body image developed before their skin was affected. If this is the case, then your body image is based on the way your skin looked during your formative years. If your psoriasis was severe in your youth, you may be left feeling badly about the way you look even when a treatment has been successful and your skin has improved.
But if you have a negative body image can you do anything to change it? The answer is a definitive yes, but it will take a bit of work and effort. There are many self help books (try Cash as a good starting point) and Changing Faces is a good resource for anyone with concerns about their body image. Visit my blog www.copingwithpsoriasis.com for more advice on how to cope with psoriasis.
It’s also encouraging to know that whilst body image doesn’t seem to change over time – unless we actively engage in strategies to change it – as we age we place less importance on appearance and thus may be less unhappy about the way we look as we mature. Well that’s something to look forward to.
Jo Jenkins
www.copingwithpsoriasis.com
Reference
Cash, T. (2008) The Body Image Workbook: An Eight-Step Program for Learning to Like Your Looks. New Harbinger.