Can Vitamin A Overcome Minus Eyes?

Vitamin A is an essential nutrient that the human body needs, and plays an important role in strong vision, a healthy immune system, growth, and reproduction of the body. You can get the required amount of vitamin A from a particular food or from supplements.

What is Vitamin A?

Vitamin A is a fat-soluble nutrient found in the animals and plants we eat, and is important for overall human health. One of the many roles of vitamin A in the body is to maintain healthy vision. It helps prevent childhood blindness and is anecdotally thought to slow down age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Vitamin A exists in two different forms – the carotenoid provitamin A and vitamin A (retinol). The first is in plants. The latter is found in animals.

Preconceived Vitamin A claims to be an active version of the vitamin because it is assimilated as it is. The provitamin A carotenoid turns into vitamin A in the body. They naturally exist in plant materials such as beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, and beta-cryptoxanthin.

What is the Function of Vitamin A in the Body?

In addition to maintaining your vision, vitamin A plays a role in many body processes. These include:

• Growth and development of the fetus. It helps maintain a healthy reproductive system and facilitates the growth of the fetus through several stages of development.
• Skin health. This can prevent the overproduction of keratin in the hair follicles, which is known to cause skin disorders such as acne.
• Immune health. It is involved in producing white blood cells, the first line of defense against pathogens in the body.

Without a doubt, the most prominent benefit of vitamin A is what it does to maintain eye health. It is involved in the production of pigments in the retina and is responsible for how we perceive low light. As a result, one of the signs of vitamin A deficiency is night blindness.

Vitamin A is an essential nutrient during the early stages of life, especially for vision. Vitamin A deficiency is the main cause of preventable blindness during childhood. Many children experiencing childhood blindness showed remarkable improvement after more vitamin A was added to their diet.

Despite the abundance of anecdotal evidence about the relationship between vitamin A and the slower rate of development of age-related macular degeneration, many studies suggest that there is nothing to indicate that vitamin A can treat myopia or even slow down AMD.

How Vitamin A Helps Your Eyes

Vitamin A plays a role in the manufacture of rhodopsin. Found in the retina of the eye, rhodopsin is a pigment that is very sensitive to light and thus useful in low-light environments. Basically, it helps you see better in the dark.

This explains why people with vitamin A deficiency first experience night blindness, a condition characterized by the inability to see correctly in an environment with low light.

The absence of rhodopsin in adequate levels makes it more difficult for the retina to capture the low carotenoid Provitamin A which is converted into vitamin A at the light level of the body, causing temporary blindness in dark places.

Vitamin A can prevent blindness during childhood because it plays an important role in the development of the eyes early on. However, many studies show that although it maintains eye health and has the potential to prevent complications in the future, it also has little or no effect on existing cases of myopia and AMD.

Consuming more vitamin A can improve your ability to see at night and keep your vision in a mint state, but it will not alleviate existing eye disorders. Sticking to the recommended intake is still recommended because vitamin A deficiency always leads to poorer vision.

Can Vitamin A Overcome Minus Eyes?

Quoting from Kompas, the Director of PKU Muhammadiyah Hospital, dr. Dien Kalbu Ady explained that the eyes are minus because the light only focuses in front of the retina. Supposedly, in normal eyes, such light is focused precisely on the retina.

Dian further emphasized that vitamin A consumption is good for overall eye health. However, there is no specific drug or supplement that can overcome the minus eye, including vitamin A though.

"To date, it has been stated that there has not been a specific drug or supplement to treat minus eyes," Dien said.