Floaters in the Eye, Not Dangerous, Just A Bother

The first time you see floaters in your eye, you’re probably worried your eyesight will soon be fading. Floaters in the eye can appear as black spots, spider web like spots as you look or sometimes they appear as little bunches of bubbles.

Floaters in the eye are not anything you have to worry about. It has been estimated that fully 90 percent of the population will have floaters in the eye at one time or another. They are more of a bother than anything else and interestingly, if you notice one on one day and it just seems to disappear the brain has a happy knack of forgetting things like that exist and your eye will work quite nicely.

Floaters in the eye occur right along the plain that leads to the macula at the back of the eye. This is the point where your eyes lens focuses the light and images it sees and there are some times where small pieces a cell can find their way through a small tear in the retina to introduce foreign bodies into the eye. You see them as dark spots that are naggingly in the way, or they may, as noted, disappear, if they stay in the same spot because the brain forgets they are there and tells your eye to move on.

Floaters in the eye are also called inclusions in the vitreous, the jelly-filled area that makes up most of your eye and they tend to appear along the focal plane of the eye because that’s what our eyes see. Ophthalmologists advise just leaving them alone because sometimes a little of the rear of the eye allow clusters of them through. It’s part of the pattern of aging, although floaters have been reported in teens. They are, for the most part benign, caused by the a little movement of the attachment point around the rear of the eye of even by tiny tears in the retina that let those inclusions through.

Again, ophthalmologists advised, just leaving them alone because it is a natural process going on in the eye. If you have them, as the author of this piece is seeing small bubbles and little almost thread-like looking things appear while this is being written and the author’s eye is focused on the screen, there’s no cause for concern because they are there all the time and about the only time they appear is on concentration. They are just benign and, even if you visit the ophthalmologist and he is able to see the tiny things you are talking about, they will usually counsel leaving eye floaters alone because they are quite natural and nothing to worry about.

What are they? Ophthalmologists will find floaters to be small cells, or bunches or proteins of possible even a little of matter let in through a small tear in the retina (they occur and do not mean detached retina) that become, sometimes, aggravating little things that can spoil your spotless eyesight.