February is Heart Health Awareness Month, a time to focus on ways to keep your ticker healthy… This is a great time to stress the importance of cardiovascular prevention and early detection.  What most people don’t realize, is that having a comprehensive eye exam can actually find underlying heart issues and diseases!

In many ways, your eye is like the window into your overall health.  During a complete eye exam, we look at structures on the surface of your eyes and deeper into the retina, which can show signs of potentially life-threating issues.  Your retina is one of the few places in your body where we can physically view the blood flow, looking for signs of blockages, swelling, and bleeding.  Many conditions are first detected in the eye, such as carotid artery disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and even cancers.

In addition to checking your vision during an eye exam, we are analyzing and recording how your eyes look.  Everyone’s retina has unique features, and evaluating these characteristics annually allows us to pick up on early changes if they occur.  Therefore, making it important that eye care become part of your preventative health care.  So, in addition to the regular visits with your primary and specialist physicians, also make annual eye exams a top priority.

Ask us about our new technology, OPTOMAP, a machine that enables us to take a digital scan of your retina… Therefore, you’ll get to see what we look at and we’ll have that documentation to compare each time you come!