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Shingles is the term we use to describe a condition that is caused by a re-activation of the Herpes Varicella-Zoster virus. The origin of this infection usually goes way back to childhood with a disease we know as chickenpox.
When you have a chickenpox infection, your immune system manages to eventually suppress that virus from causing an active infection, but the virus does not get completely eliminated from your body--it is able to go and hide in your nerve roots.
Your immune system manages to keep the virus in check for most of your life but there may come a time in adulthood when your immune system is not working as well as it used to, and the virus can reappear. It usually does this along the distribution of a single sensory nerve called a dermatome.
The most common area for this to occur is along your trunk (chest, abdomen, or back) but it is also commonly found on the face.
There are three branches of nerves that supply sensation to your face. They are all branches of the fifth cranial nerve. Those three branches supply the upper face (V1), the mid face (V2), and the lower face (V3). Most of the time, shingles breaks out along only one of the branches at a time. The one that most frequently involves the eye is a rash breakout in the V1 distribution. This can involve the forehead and both the upper and lower eyelid. It is also much
Will reading glasses make your eyes worse? The short answer is "No."
Although we don’t know the exact mechanism by which humans lose the ability to focus up close as we age (a process called presbyopia), the fact remains that it happens to almost all of us.
The leading theory of how this occurs is that the lenses in our eyes get stiffer and thicker as we age--one of the muscles in the eye that contracts to change the shape of the lens does so less and less effectively because the lens itself gets less pliable.
The process of changing the focus of the lens from far away objects to up-close objects is called accommodation. If you have normal distance vision without glasses, then your eye's natural focus spot is far off in the distance. In order to focus on an object close to you, the lens in your eye has to alter its shape. The ability of your lens to do that is at its best when you are born and it slowly gets less and less pliable as the years go on. You have such a tremendous ability to accommodate when you are young that the slow loss of this ability is not perceptible, until you reach about the age of 45.
At around 45 the lens has lost so much accommodative ability that you start to have difficulty focusing on near objects. The impact usually starts when you notice that in order to
