Why Are The Inner Corners Of My Eyes Blue?
- Pieter Maas
As you age, the structure and appearance of your body change. This is natural and not typically a cause for concern. As your skin, bone structure, and hair color change due to aging, your eyes may change, too. It’s not unusual for blue-tinted rings to appear around your iris — the colored part of your eye.
Why is the inside corner of my eye blue?
Sclera: Definition, Anatomy & Function The sclera, or white of the eye, is strong tissue that wraps around the eyeball. It helps maintain your eyeball’s shape and protects it from injury. Several things can make the entire sclera change color or cause spots of color. Many scleral conditions resolve on their own in a few weeks, but some require medical attention. The sclera wraps around the eyeball. The sclera, or white of the eye, is a protective covering that wraps over most of the eyeball. It extends from the in the front to the optic nerve in the back. This strong layer of tissue, which is no more than a millimeter thick, gives your eyeball its white color.
- It also protects and supports your eye.
- The plural for sclera is sclerae.
- The sclera functions as the supporting wall of the eyeball.
- It helps maintain your eyeball’s shape, and protects it from injury.
- The sclera is covered by conjunctiva, which are clear mucus membranes that lubricate (moisturize) your eye.
Muscles attached to the sclera help move your eyeball up and down and side to side. The sclera is made of tough collagen fibers, which crisscross in random directions. That random pattern gives your eyeball its white color and gives the sclera strength.
Episclera, clear, thin tissue resting on top of the whites of your eyeballs. Stroma, made up of fibroblasts and collagen fibers, blending into the episclera. Lamina fusca, a transitional layer between the sclera and the choroid and ciliary body outer layers. Endothelium, the basal, or innermost layer of the sclera.
Several things can cause the entire sclera to change color or spots of color to appear:
Blue sclera: If the sclera is thinner than normal, blood vessels may show through, giving your eyeballs a blue or gray hue. This may occur in people with certain health conditions. Examples include (a genetic bone disease) and (a disorder in connective tissue throughout the body). Other examples include iron deficiency and, Icteric sclera and jaundice: If the entire sclerae turn yellow, that could mean you have, Jaundice indicates liver disease, which means the liver isn’t filtering blood properly. Injury: If your eyeball is injured, it may have a bright red spot. This indicates a broken blood vessel that has leaked some blood. These red spots are usually harmless and go away in a few days or weeks. Irritation: If your eyes are “bloodshot,” you can see redness throughout the sclerae. Eyes may be irritated due to smoke, allergies, exhaustion or infection. Medication: Some medications can tint the sclerae blue or gray (for example, an antibiotic called minocycline). Melanosis: Your sclera may contain a flat, brown spot, almost like a freckle. This is more common in Black people. The spots are caused by high levels of pigment called melanin, and they’re harmless. Pinguecula: A small patch of yellow may bulge out from your sclera after damage from the sun, wind or dust. The patch may become inflamed and turn pink or red. Pterygium: If a pinguecula goes untreated, it can get larger, expand into the cornea and block vision. Primary acquired melanosis (PAM): If you have a flat brown spot on the eye that changes over time, this may indicate PAM. This condition can become cancerous, so report any new or changing spots on the sclera.
Why is the corner of my eye purple?
What Causes Them? – Raccoon eyes are usually a symptom of an injury to the eyes or head. Injuries can stretch and tear tiny blood vessels called capillaries under your eyes. Blood leaks into the skin and turns it a dark purple color. Because the skin under your eyes is very delicate, even a minor injury can cause a lot of blood to pool underneath.
- Fractures to the face and other head injuries can cause raccoon eyes, although you may not notice them right away.
- It can take 1 to 3 days after the injury for the dark color to appear.
- Raccoon eyes can also be a symptom of certain systemic conditions, but that’s not the most likely case.
- They can happen with primary amyloidosis, a disease that causes an abnormal protein to build up in tissues around the body.
Primary amyloidosis can weaken blood vessels so much that a strong sneeze or cough is enough to break them. Other diseases that weaken or stretch the blood vessels can also cause raccoon eyes, including:
Eye aneurysm Blood clot in the sinuses Giant cell arteritis Migraine and other headaches Increased pressure in the brain Hemophilia
Some cancers have raccoon eyes as one of their symptoms, including:
Lymphoma and leukemia Multiple myeloma Neuroblastoma Kaposi sarcoma
Surgery on the ear, eye, sinuses, or nose can also cause raccoon eyes.
Why is the skin around my eyes bluish?
A bluish color to the skin or mucous membrane is usually due to a lack of oxygen in the blood. The medical term is cyanosis.
What is the inner corner of the eye called?
|Front of left eye with eyelids separated to show medial canthus.|
The canthus (pl. canthi, palpebral commissures ) is either corner of the eye where the upper and lower eyelids meet. More specifically, the inner and outer canthi are, respectively, the medial and lateral ends/angles of the palpebral fissure, The bicanthal plane is the transversal plane linking both canthi and defines the upper boundary of the midface,
What color are the inside of your eyes supposed to be?
The white part of the eye, called the sclera, is a protective layer that covers more than 80% of the eyeball’s surface. A healthy sclera is white. But what does it mean when the sclera takes on a different hue? If your whites become yellow, like Michael Jordan’s eyes in ‘The Last Dance,’ or otherwise discolored, consult with your ophthalmologist.
Can anemia change your eye color?
Abstract – 169 hospital inpatients were studied to assess the association of blue sclerae with iron-deficiency anaemia. Three observers independently graded the signs of blue sclerae and mucosal pallor as absent, equivocal, definite, or striking. Blue sclerae were seen more often in patients with iron-deficiency anaemia (40/46, 87%) than in those with other anaemias (2/28, 7%; p less than 0.001) or without anaemia (5/95, 5.3%; p less than 0.001).
The specificity of blue sclerae in iron-deficiency anaemia was 0.94 with a sensitivity of 0.87. By comparison, mucosal pallor was noted in only 30% of patients with iron-deficiency anaemia, with a specificity of 0.96 and a sensitivity of only 0.20 (p less than 0.001). The presence of blue sclerae was unaffected by age, sex, or colour of iris.
Blue sclerae appear to be a good indicator of iron deficiency and should become a regular part of clinical examination.
Is blue sclera common?
Blue scleras are very uncommon. You are truly a rare find! The white of our eyes, also known as the sclera, serves as a protective outer coat. It is a tough, leather-like tissue that surrounds the entire eye. The white sclera takes on a bluish tint when this normally thick tissue thins.
- The sclera becomes translucent, allowing the underlying tissue to show through.
- There are lots of reasons someone can have blue “whites”.
- Anything that results in a thinning of the sclera could cause it.
- For example, some medications, like steroids, can produce blue sclera.
- Not having enough iron in your blood (anemia) and aging have also been shown to give a blue tint to the whites of the eye.
While most cases of sclera discoloration are benign, they can sometimes be a sign of something more serious like Osteogenesis Imperfecta, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, Russell Silver Syndrome, Pyknodysostosis, Hallermann- Schermann-Streiff syndrome and Marfan Syndrome,
It is important to note that all of these diseases are extremely rare and have other obvious symptoms as well. Anyone with a blue sclera may want to see an ophthalmologist to rule out these possibilities. Osteogenesis imperfecta are one potential cause of blue sclerae. (Image from Wikipedia ) As you indicated in your question, one extremely rare cause of blue sclera is Osteogenesis Imperfecta, or Brittle Bone Disease.
Only 1 in of every 10,000 people has this rare disease. As you may guess from its name, patients with Brittle Bone Disease have fragile bones that break easily. The condition is caused by problems with a crucial protein called collagen. Collagen provides the internal scaffolding of our bodies, giving us shape and support.
- It can be likened to the iron beams that hold up a building.
- Faulty collagen leads to many problems for our body.
- There are actually four types of Brittle Bone Disease whose symptoms range from mild to severe.
- Type I is the most common and, fortunately, the mildest.
- Not all patients have the same symptoms, but they usually have several of the most common.
Blue sclera, easily fractured bones, curvature of the spine, brittle teeth, short height, and hearing loss are all frequently seen. Types II, III, and IV are more severe than Type I and even less frequent. For instance, Type II is so severe, that these children die before or soon after birth.
Now, if I read your question correctly, your concern is that if someone’s eyes have a bluish tint to them, then they may be a carrier for a disease like Brittle Bone Disease. What is a carrier? Remember, we have two copies of most of our approximately 25,000 genes, one from mom and one from dad. For a lot of diseases, you need two “bad” copies to end up with the disease, one from each parent.
These are called recessive diseases, A carrier is someone who has one “good” copy and one “bad” copy of a disease-related gene. They do not have the disease themself but could pass it along to their kids. This is what it means to be a carrier. Other diseases only need one “bad” copy.
This is the situation with most cases of Brittle Bone Disease. BBD is a dominant disease, Brittle Bone Disease is caused by a mutation in one of the two genes that make that important collagen protein, Col1A1 or Col1A2. If someone has a single “bad” copy of either of these genes, they have the disease.
Because of this, they also have a 50% chance of passing it down to their kids. Where does the 50% number come from? Well, which of the two copies of a gene gets passed down to our kids is random. Since there are two copies, then there is a 1 in 2, or 50%, chance that the disease version will be passed on.
- What if two people with BBD have kids? Then the chances of their children being affected goes up to 75%.
- As you can see, diseases that need two “bad”copies of a gene (recessive diseases) can stay hidden in our gene pool through “carriers”.
- This is not true of diseases caused by a single “bad” copy (dominant diseases).
In a dominant disease (left), you only need to inherit one “bad” copy to have the disease. In recessive diseases (right), you need to inherit two “bad” copies to have the disease. Osteogenesis imperfecta is a dominant disease. (Image from Wikipedia ) You may wonder how the mutations for these rare dominant diseases stick around.
- Why aren’t they purged over time? There are actually a couple good reasons.
- With some diseases, symptoms don’t appear until later in life.
- Individuals often pass along their “bad” gene to their children before they even know they have the disease themselves.
- Huntington’s Disease is a classic example of this.
Symptoms usually start cropping up between the ages of 30 and 45, sometimes even later. This is also true for some cases of Parkinson’s, a disease we hear much of in the news due to the efforts of Michael J. Fox. However, recent advancements are changing genetics.
Genetic testing and pre-implantation embryo screening for some diseases can give people the choice not to pass on their “bad” genes. Sometimes, mutations in our genes seemingly pop up out of nowhere. There is no family history of the disorder in these cases. This is called spontaneous mutation. What happens is that the DNA gets changed in either the sperm or the egg and is passed onto the child.
These changes can come from things in our environment or through mistakes our bodies make when it makes new DNA. About 25% of children with Brittle Bone Disease can blame spontaneous mutations for their disorders. It is important again to stress that anyone with blue sclera should see a doctor to rule out these rare diseases.