Children under age 3 with a blocked tear duct could be at increased risk for amblyopia, according to a recent study in the Journal of the American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus. The authors reported that of the 375 children studied, 22% had amblyopia risk factors—an eight-fold increase compared with rates in the general population.

Check your patients fingernails for early glaucoma? Data from a Korean clinical series showed nail bed vascular abnormalities had a significant association with optic disc hemorrhage and other manifestations of glaucoma. They performed nailfold capillaroscopy on 108 patients with glaucoma and found that the majority had nail bed abnormalities, including dilated vessels, loss of capillaries and nail bed hemorrhage. The authors suggest this could open up new therapeutic and diagnostic options for glaucoma patients in the future.

A recent survey by the Ocular Nutrition Society found that 55% of baby boomers worry about vision loss almost as much as they worry about cancer or heart disease. And although 78% of respondents ranked vision as the most important of their five senses, less than half (43%) visited their eye doctor once a year.  The survey, supported by an educational grant from Bausch + Lomb, interviewed about 1,000 Americans, few of whom knew about key nutrients that play a role in eye health. Two-thirds weren’t aware of lutein’s role in eye health and more than half didn’t know that omega-3s contribute to healthy vision.