Who knew? (Not enough folks): Smoking causes blindness

Is there a link between smoking and blindness? If you weren’t aware that there is, it’s probably for lack of a national awareness campaign. Smoking is indeed causally associated with a number of visually impairing eye diseases, including cataracts and age-related macular degeneration, but a recently released international study in the journal Optometry found that most people simply aren’t aware of the risk. (They might have been, had they perused our classic monograph: Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn’t Tell You).

Researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada and the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston used a random telephone survey, soliciting input from more than 11,000 adult smokers in four countries — Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia — about their knowledge of the association between smoking and vision loss. Less than 13 percent of those surveyed outside of Australia had any knowledge of the risk. Significantly, in Australia — the only country with national awareness campaigns about smoking-related vision loss — 47 percent of smokers were aware of the link between smoking and blindness.

Researchers, whose study was part of the International Tobacco Four-Country Project, conclude that there is a need to educate the public on this additional risk related to smoking; they believe greater awareness of it could improve rates of smoking cessation and further discourage people from starting at all. ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross agrees: “Knowledge about the dangers of smoking as related to eye health are remarkably deficient in the U.S. and Canada. More must be done there, and everywhere, to educate people about these risks, since fear of blindness would very likely dissuade many young people from starting to smoke.”