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Colour Blindness Impacts upon A Significant Proportion Of The Population But There Is No Remedy As The Complaint Is Caused By An Inherited Genetic Fault

16th March, 2011 - Posted by health news - No Comments

Colour Blindness (also called Colour Vision Deficiency) is one of those health complaints which almost everyone has heard of. It is, as the name suggests, the inability to observe and distinguish between particular colours. It is caused by a defective gene in the X chromosome and is far more frequently found in males than females, although it is clear that a mother can have the faulty gene and transfer it to her offspring.

A very small group of females do have colour blindness, but the amount is only about 0.5% of the population compared to instances of males who have the problem which is believed to be approximately eight to ten percent of the population, depending on which sources you believe.

The most regular type of colour blindness is that when red and green become difficult to identify, or the sufferer finds it hard differentiating between variations of red, green, brown and orange. A rare form of the complaint affects identification of blues and yellows, and an even more obscure variant means that the sufferer will not see colour at all and instead occupies a black and white world.

The strange thing is that the defect itself is completely harmless (though it may justify some of those seriously bad outfits spotted on a night out!) and it doesn’t really have any other serious impact on the general quality of the sufferer’s vision. Naturally, someone who has colour blindness could also be short or long sighted, and while corrective lenses or Laser eye surgery may solve that problem, it will have no impact at all on the individual’s ability to view colours correctly.

The fact that the problem is harmless and has no side-effects on the sufferer means that there are possibly quite a lot of of people out there who haven’t even realised that they suffer from it, until they have some reason to get their eyes checked. For example, there are some occupations where colour blindness can cause big problems and for several quite obvious reasons some professions may exclude those who suffer. The Royal Air Force in the UK has a strict policy of insisting on perfect sight and no colour vision defects for their newly recruited pilots. Whilst they will employ trained pilots who later develop eye defects and permit them to use glasses or have Laser eye treatment to resolve the problem, anyone with colour blindness will have suffered with it since birth, so regrettably there is no likelihood of them becoming an RAF pilot.

It may seem strange that an eye defect such as this has not been subject to research to try and find a way of correcting the vision, particularly when there are many treatments for other eye complaints, such as Laser eye surgery for long and short sightedness, lens removal and replacement for those with cataracts and conventional surgery to relieve the impact of glaucoma. However, these are all issues which are caused by defects or imperfections in the parts of the eye itself, instead of a genetic fault handed down from generation to generation. It therefore seems unlikely that research is likely to come up with a miracle Laser eye cure or surgical treatment that can repair a defective colour identification gene.