KC and pollen allergy

[Tammy Downsworth]

I suffer from pollen allergy, rub my eyes.

The times when I've progressed more have been when I've been actively stopping myself from rubbing my eye's now I don't bother stopping myself.

Time of year is irrelevant, when I came out this morn, there was snow on the ground and my eyes are itchy, and in January something flowered or a cloud of pollen passed over about four int morning as I was aware that my eyes were itching and I woke up because of it (that'll teach us to leave the bedroom window open!).

I am still picking up from various web sources that eye rubbing causes KC to progress, but like Gareth I think that the itch is the KC progressing and rubbing eyes makes no difference at all. Maybe it is actually the pollen getting a direct hit if you like on the cross linkage bit of the cornea and snapping the collagen structure holding the layers of the cornea together, if you think what pollen does to a plant it embeds itself in the female part and turns the flower to seed, maybe it's just trying with our corneas and we have thin ones so the pollen affects our KC. Yes there are more hayfever sufferes than KCers, (and mine is the eye watery/stingy one too I do sneeze etc. but not often). Just a theory.

I want to make a huge (maybe blow up?)model of the eye and cornea maybe if we did have such a model, we could actualy demonstrate rather than describe.

Anyway, I am going to continue to rub my eye's as long as my hands are clean I see (!! sorry) no reason why not.

Tam

[Louise Pembroke]

There are some wonderful plastic models of the eye which comes apart but I bet they are expensive

[Andrew MacLean]

I want to make a huge (maybe blow up?)model of the eye and cornea maybe if we did have such a model, we could actualy demonstrate rather than describe.

Tam

Excellent idea.

Andrew

[Tammy Downsworth]

Right now I've gone public with my (three o clock in the morning when I couldn't sleep) idea of making a huge model of the eye.

I was thinking about a blow up one, this started with a hairdryer (one of those that are a hood) with the optic nerve being the thing that connects with the drier to the hood, and said hood being the eye, the gap being the cornea.

I will photograph V1.01 (the hairdrier with drawings on the hood) that's better than describing it.

The finished article would have to be man sized so that layers of the cornea can be identified separately, with maybe cotton buds as the collagen linkages. Wonder how big the eye would have to be for a cotton bud to be in scale? I'll get the calculator out.

Tam

[jayuk]

Massive! lol...if you want to show the collagen the actual corneal tissue would need to be large!!!...

[Andrew MacLean]

Tam

How are you going to depict the collogen, the epi thelium and the endo thelium?

I'm beginning to get into this idea. Hope it works.

Andrew

[GarethB]

I find the best way to demonstarte KC is to get willing victims to wear a pair of safety glasses and then tu use a plant sprayer set on the fine mist and sprey water onto the lenses.

Gives an interesting effect of what I see and if you tilt your head some things get sharper while others get blurrred.

Much like KC.

[Andrew MacLean]

Gareth

That sounds like a really good way of showing people how hard it can be,

Andrew

[rosemary johnson]

To answer the original question: I get hay fever, though what exactly causes it, I don't know. I presume it is some sort of pollen that is one of the triggers, but it seems to be more sensitive to air pollution/photochemical smog. You'll appreciate we get a lot of that in East London, and my hay fever seems to be orse when the radio weather forecasts say poor air quality than high pollen count.
I never used to get hay fever before I had the contact lenses - I'd had y first lenses for several months and my eyes started getting red and sore. My mum dragged me off to the GP who said "It's conjunctivitis" and prescribed eye ointment, which I hated, and didn't seem to have any effect. Then a week or so later I went to see Keith Nelson, who fitted the contact lenses.
He took one look and said "Do you get hay fever?"
"No," I said.
He went on looking and said "You do now."
And suggested this wonderful substances called K-lens to fill up the sclerals with before i put them in.
The hay fever was never half so bad before I moved to London - more evidence for the air quality being the culprit.
It main affects my asthma, butdoes make the eyes sore and the lens wearing time less too. and hits with a whammy when I go abroad and meet plants i'm not used to (such as in Africa).

I always attributed the problems with pollen and lenses more to the effect of abrasion from small particles in the air than any chemical reaction - which again would tie in which poor air quality and the particulates from diesel exhaust fumes in the atmosphere, but thiking about it probably isn't the whole story!

About links of KC/hay fever, allergies, asthma, eczema, etc: the common link between all those conditions, and many other allergies, is they are auto-immune conditions. That is, "unnecessary" illnesses caused by the body's own defence mechanisms overreacting to something that shouldn't be a big problem, really.

IIRR it was at the firt of the KC group conferences that one of the speakers suggested there may be an auto=immune effect in triggering KC (on top of a genetic link, which I thought was now widely supposed).
In other words, one has a genetic disposition to it, and the auto-immune theory would be that it is triggered by the body starting to attack itself in some way.

Maybe someone else who was there may remember this more clearly?

now, here's something interesting:
in my family, all my mum's side of the family have ordinary short-sightedness and astigmatism. My dad's mother died of rheumatoid arthritis - another auto-immune disease.
i have KC; also asthma and hay fever, am allergic to cats, horses (!), volatime chemical solvents, paint fumes, photochemcial smog, etc, and swell up horribly with some insect bites and sometimes if horses lick my arms.
My sister (who is ordinarily short-sighted but no KC) has eczema.
Could there possibly be something there to do with the astigmatism gene meeting up with the auto-immune problems gene??

About eye rubbing: this strikes me as daft! SO people with less than perfect eyesight have eyes that have to work hard - and maybe have to assume unnatural screwed-up positions to see what we need to see. What fo people do when their muscles are getting tired after a lot of hard work? - simple; they rub them! It's a natural instinct.
Similarly, if you've been lugging loads about - say a heavy rucksack, or heavy shopping bags. What do you do when you finally put them down? Wriggle the shoulders, shakes the arms, wiggle the fingers that were round the shoping bag handle. Rub the shoulders, anyone? Rub your forearms where the handle gripping muscles were working? Get a friend to massage your back?
What do lots of horses do when you get off backs at the end of a long ride and take their saddles off? - lie down and roll around on their backs.

Is it really any surprise that people who have been wearing contact lenses for a long period, and/or who have been working the muscles round their eyes harder than a "normal2 person to see properly, should want to rub the affected areas??
I say NO!

In fact, it's a sound instinct to rub areas where muscles have been owrking hard, and/or have had loads on them. It helps tobring fresh blood to the area, bringing in oxygen and other goodies, and helps the lactic acid - a "waste metabolite" that builds up in hard-working muscles - to be carried away, thus helping rapid recovery.

rosemary

[GarethB]

Going back a few points regarding illness as a possible trigger, when the body is under stress, both physical and psychological it is still possible for the body to do odd things regarding hormones.

The body also has an amazing capacity to compensate for defects for want of a better word.

I am sure I had KC before I was diagnosed but as I was within one line of 6/6 why resort to glasses if I was not geting headaches. Demonstarted this when I had an eye test 3 weeks before I was to have a medical for the RAF. 2 days before the medical I got two black eyes plaing rugby which meant the medical was posponed, but I did the rest of the tests for the RAF. 9 days after getting the black eyes, went for an eye test just to make sure I would still pass the RAF medical, I could barely make the third line.

The optom said my eye looked just the same so referred me to the hospital to see if I had done any further damage. There I was told that the period of not being able to see because of the swelling around the eye it was more likely my brain had forgotten how to compensate.