Vitamins and Your Eyes

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The information in this article is intended as a helpful guide only. It is not intended to be used as a substitute for professional advice. If you have any questions about your medications and what is right for you see your doctor, pharmacist or other health care professional.

A couple of years ago, people kept coming into the pharmacy looking for vitamins with lutein in them. I, frankly, had no idea what they were talking about. Then vitamins like Icaps, Ocuvite and Vitalux among others started appearing with lutein in them. Lately, I’ve seen patients come in with recommendations from their optometrists for Vitalux AREDS for macular degeneration. So can vitamins help you eyes? Should you just eat lots of carrots? Do carrots help you see better anyway?

Let’s start with carrots. Carrots contain carotenoids. Carotenoids are yellow to red pigments found in a variety of plants. Carotenoids are a group of chemicals that include beta-carotene, lycophene, and lutein. I am over simplifying the chemistry here, but for this article we will consider beta-carotene as a water soluble version of vitamin A and the other carotenoids as antioxidants that are good for your eyes and other things. Not enough vitamin A can cause night blindness, so eating carrots and getting beta-carotene can prevent nightblindness. So, yes in that way carrots are good for your eyes. In an odd twist, though, people who smoke or have a history of asbestos exposure should not use beta-carotene supplements. There is some evidence to suggest this increases their risk of lung and prostate cancer.

It is less clear what lutein does for you. Lutein is believed to work in two ways. First it filters blue light. If you remember back to high school physics, blue light has the shortest wavelength of the visible light spectrum, so it has the highest energy. So lutein filters high energy blue light which is protective for the eye. The second thing lutein does is act as an antioxidant. Lutein finds and destroys “bad” oxygen molecules. Oxygen can be turned into a oxygen radical by things like being hit with light. Free oxygen radicals are “bad” because they are just dying to react chemically with anything they touch. If they react chemically with certain parts of your body’s cells they can damage or kill the cell. So it is a good thing that lutein gets rid of these reactive oxygen species. Researchers also believe that the more people consume lutein, the less they get eye problems like age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and cataracts.

The lutein data is promising but not conclusive yet. There was a small study of 90 patients called the LAST (Lutein Antioxidant Supplement Trial) in the journal Optometry in 2004 that showed that lutein alone or in combination with other nutrients improved visual functions in patients with AMD. But because the study was so small and had mostly men in it and didn’t go on for very long (1 year), it is not the final word yet.

Well what is this age-related macular degeneration anyway? AMD is the leading cause of blindness in people 65 and over in the Western world. People with AMD may notice such things as the center of their vision getting blurry. Lines on graph paper may appear wavy, and the squares may appear distorted.

So what about Vitalux AREDS for macular degeneration? Well, the National Eye Institute in the US sponsored the Age-Related Eye Disease Study (AREDS). The AREDS study concludes that zinc plus antioxidants can slow the progression of intermediate or advanced AMD in high risk patients. At the moment, it has not been showed that these vitamins help people with early AMD. The patients in the AREDS study used a vitamin C 500mg, vitamin E 400 IU, zinc 80 mg, and beta-carotene 15 mg. This is the dose you get with 2 tabs of Vitalux AREDS.

As always if you have any questions or concerns about these or other products, ask your pharmacist.