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Thank you for taking the time to write all of this and answer my post! I purchased a sleep mask so I will test that out and see if it works. At first I did think that maybe there was some link to the light, because my room has great sun exposure. However, I slept at my grandma's house in a very dark room and still experienced the problem. I wonder if, as you said, the long term exposure made my couple of nights in darkness irrelevant. I also recently took one of those send-away ancestry and health DNA tests. My results showed that I carry the gene for AMD, which is not shocking to me because my grandmother and my great aunt both have macular degeneration. I will look into the supplement you mentioned, too. Thanks for your help!
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@julianned You're welcome. I hope you'll check back in and let us know if your experimentation with a sleep mask is successful. Astaxanthin is what gives salmon a red color. I found a study that talks about nutrition and glycemic index, Omega 3 & 6 intake and zeaxanthint for prevention of macular degeneration. An excerpt states,
"lutein and zeaxanthin have the ability to absorb blue light before it reaches the photoreceptors" so it functions to prevent damaging blue light exposure."
This also talks about the regenerative functions in the retina and how the body works to remove damaged photreceptors and how that is different in macular degeneration. Here is a quote:
"Photoreceptors are exposed to extensive oxidative stress in the form of light and oxygen [6]. As a result, the outer 10% of photoreceptor segments are shed each night. These must be engulfed, degraded and the debris removed by the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE), which lies posterior to the photoreceptors [7]. Since one RPE cell services 30 photoreceptors, the RPE has among the highest degradative burdens in the body. In addition, the RPE is involved in maintaining the nutriture of the photoreceptors. Since photoreceptors do not have their own blood supply, it is crucial for nutrients from the choroidal blood supply to cross Bruch’s membrane and enter the RPE and photoreceptors [6,8,9]. Adequate nutritional support to the RPE also facilitates efficient turnover of photoreceptors."
I think the take away message here is that disease prevention can be achieved by sensible eating to reduce inflammation and oxidative stress in the body. The body expends a lot of energy in maintenance to keep the retinas working. It isn't just eyesight that depends on this, it's everything else too. Here is the study. It's pretty interesting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3738980/