I think there's some miscommunication here. Certainly, it's possible for light to damage the retina. It's likely that blue light is more apt to cause damage because it's higher energy. This doesn't mean that LEDs producing a larger blue component are more damaging than LEDs (or other lights) with a smaller blue component. It's entirely possible that at the intensity artificial light is used for indoor and street lighting, how much of the light is blue is irrelevant.
I didn't read this entire article, but it seems to be discussing the general mechanism of light damage. There was no reference to LEDs. I'd want to see something that gave reason to believe that the blue in LEDs poses a threat.
OFFTOPIC: Isn't blue light still best to be avoided as much as possible, as it damages cells in the eye, causing macula degeneration. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
> Blue LED light may be toxic to your retina with long term exposure.
I wasn't aware of this. Do you mean LED light specifically? Is it in some way inherently different from the much more intense blue light of the sun? I don't see how light from one source can be any more damaging than from another source; it's all just the same EM radiation.
"But ophthalmologists aren’t worried. The blue light emanating from the sun drastically overpowers any rays coming from your screen. And so far, all of the research on how real human eyes react to blue light has failed to link screens to permanent damage of any kind. Blue light’s most concerning effects still seems limited to sleeplessness."
One group of people who could potentially be affected: people who use anti-SAD lighting (especially people building souped-up DIY rigs: https://meaningness.com/metablog/sad-light-led-lux). Those use LEDs and are specifically meant to be very bright and very blue.
Hopefully this turns out not to be a big deal. Having to choose between depression and retina damage would sure suck :/
|I recall that a paper published by Oxford in a journal related to gerontology claimed that blue light accelerated aging of the |retina. If I understand correctly, this article doesn't counter that claim outright, it just didn't find that risk with the low | |intensity of blue light coming from a typical monitor.
I don't know the paper you're referring to but I'd be curious to read it. The most commonly espoused hypothesis that I hear is that increased exposure to blue light increases the rate of progression of age-related macular degeneration. Macular degeneration is essentially an accumulation of the byproducts of photoreceptor recycling in the retina. Certain people in the business of selling glasses latched onto this idea and it's spawned a cottage industry of snake oil salesman peddling dubiously effective blue-light filtering glasses and other gizmos. As far as I am aware there is no evidence that blue light actually increases the rate of progression of AMD in humans, and there's some compelling evidence that it has no effect.
There is a growing body of evidence that cumulative lifetime exposure to blue wavelength light increases the risk of AMD. (Age-related Macular Degeneration, which can lead to blindness).
> Blue light is a type of light that is emitted by the sun and by electronic devices, and it has been shown to cause strain on the eyes and disrupt sleep patterns.
It is already known that you can damage retinal tissue with the light from blue LEDs. At a particular power density blue will be the more damaging colour as it has the highest energy. So the question is if the intensities and duration of exposure encountered in day to day life can cause permanent damage to the retina.
Last I heard there isn't strong scientific proof blue light is bad for you. I mean if you go outside at night the moon looks awfully close in color to a phone screen...
There's research showing that extended exposure to (extremely bright) sunlight can damage the eyes. There's no research I'm aware of showing that blue spectrum light from, eg., a computer or cellphone screen, which is what people are usually concerned with, can do damage. (And obviously nothing about blue lights on cars, but clearly they're not going to be particularly bright either.)
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