The Importance of an Annual Eye Exam

Regular exams catch vision changes, eye diseases, and even chronic diseases affecting your body at the earliest possible stage. Early detection allows timely treatment that can prevent diseases and maintain excellent eyesight.

Preventive healthcare is just as crucial for your eyes as it is for every other part of your body. Annual eye exams can reveal signs of vision and eye problems before you experience symptoms.

When our team at Eye Care & Surgery in New York City and New Rochelle identifies eye problems at an early stage, we can protect your vision and prevent or delay the development of chronic eye diseases that develop over time. Let’s explore four benefits of annual eye exams.

Identify and correct vision changes

Maintaining clear vision is the primary reason people schedule eye exams. But many put off scheduling an exam until they experience significant vision changes — a habit that deprives them of the benefits of early treatment.

When you get an annual eye exam, we can detect vision changes before they become more severe and noticeable to you. Finding changes early makes a difference because it gives us the opportunity to:

Provide timely vision correction that ensures healthy vision
Slow the progression of refractive errors (nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism)
Prevent eyestrain and headaches caused by uncorrected refractive errors
Prevent amblyopia (lazy eye) and support children’s visual development

Regular eye exams help support eye comfort, visual acuity, and overall eye function.

Prevent or slow the progression of eye disease

Age-related eye diseases develop gradually over many years. As these conditions slowly worsen, many don’t cause symptoms until the disease causes serious eye damage. In other words, you won’t know you have a potential problem until it reaches an advanced stage.

During your eye exam, we can detect slight changes that occur in the early stage of diseases such as:

With early treatment, we can prevent many conditions. We can also significantly slow the progress of other conditions, keeping your eyes healthy as long as possible.

Detect chronic diseases

Changes in the eye’s blood vessels, nerves, and connective tissues reveal information about health problems throughout the body.

A comprehensive eye exam lets us detect signs of many chronic conditions, including:

Type 2 diabetes
High blood pressure
High cholesterol
Coronary artery disease
Multiple sclerosis
Rheumatoid arthritis
Certain cancers
Sarcoidosis
Brain tumors

The earliest signs of these diseases appear in your eyes before you have other physical symptoms, giving you the opportunity to see your healthcare provider for treatments that can prevent some conditions and slow disease progression in others.

Support vision development in children

It’s crucial to identify vision problems in children, because they interfere with learning, behavior, and development.

Pediatricians screen for eye problems during well-child visits. Some schools perform occasional vision screenings. But screenings are not the same as a comprehensive eye exam.

Screenings detect signs of the most common vision problems, including lazy eye, misaligned eyes (strabismus), and refractive errors.

Screenings do not diagnose eye conditions, evaluate overall eye health, or assess for all the essential vision skills and conditions.

If a vision screening reveals any potential problems, your child is referred to an eye specialist for a comprehensive exam. Parents who schedule routine eye exams ensure that their child’s vision and eye health remain optimal through proper evaluations.

If you have any concerns about your eyes or vision, or you’re ready to schedule a comprehensive exam, call us or book an appointment online. Our offices are located in New Rochelle, New York, as well as two New York City locations: in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan and in the Bronx, across from Yankee Stadium.