Usually everybody talks about congenital color blindness—inherited through your parents.

But there are also many people who are suffering from acquired color vision deficiency which isn’t present from birth on and even could disappear again after a certain timespan.

Several days ago my boyfrined told me that his eyes started to hurt form time to time. He never had problems with the eyes. He is a web designer and a programmer though. This pain was increasing from day to day and yesterday the doctor told him that he has some type of Daltonism. He started to loose the real colors during dayperiod. He was told to get physical health and make exercises often.

I want to know is this possible? Can this be a real diagnoses and how can we help it?

It is definitely possible to loose color vision. This can be caused by many different diseases, some of them I’ll list below. Concerning this diagnosis the main question I would ask is:

Can any form of color blindness cause eye pain?

In this case you can compare it with near- or farsightedness. Some people have it, some not. Most people get farsighted when they get older but most important of all, it never causes pain. This is just what and how you can see, but it can never be the cause of pain. It might only be a symptom for some other disease.

This is the same with any type of color vision deficiency. It doesn’t matter if you acquire it or suffer from some congenital form, color blindness never causes any pain. In this case the described color vision problem is caused by something else. The color blindness itself is a side-effect of this and the pain must be caused by something different.

Here is a list of possible causes to loose color vision:

• Diabetes, a disease in which you don’t produce or properly use insulin.
• Injury. A strong hit on your head could make you loose color vision.
• Age.. With age some changes in the eye can cause a blue-weakness.
• Chemicals, Drugs and heavy Tobacco smoking.
• Glaucoma

This list is not complete and there are many other diseases which can in certain cases cause color blindness.

Comparing the above description of eye pain and the list of diseases which could be a cause of loosing color vision, I would say it could be some form of Glaucoma. This is caused by an increasing pressure of the fluid inside the eyeball. There are many different forms of glaucoma, but some of them can cause eye pain and can develop enough pressure onto the blood vessels in the eye to cause some form of color vision deficiency.

The advice to get physical exercise sounds a bit strange to me but it could help (I’m not an eye specialist). Most important is, that color blindness doesn’t cause eye pain and therefore there must be something else causing the pain and with the side effect of loosing proper color vision.

I would strongly recommend you to contact an eye specialist to find the real reason behind the pain. He should be able to give you a proper diagnosis and hopefully can cure it.

You might also like to visit the Glaucoma Research Foundation, which provides a lot of very useful information and also offers help.