Well then, feel free to provide the research. You can then also send it directly to UK's General Optical Council because they actually sue companies who claim health benefits from blue light filtering [1] because there is no evidence for real-world effects. Or the EU's Scientific Committee on Health, Environmental and Emerging Risk, because they, too, say that there is no scientific base for the claim of real-world effects [2, page 90]. Or Cochrane review, who say that there is no health effect in case of macula degeneration [3].
Also please don't get personal. My campfire illustration was not a rant, it was an illustration of humans using light after sunset. It is a fact that they did so for millenia. It is also a fact that a 1300K hot fire emits blue light and even UV light.
And luminosity (lux) is just luminous flux (lumens) per square meter. Astronomers use that because luminosity is the measure used to compare different light sources. If comparing e.g. a ceiling light and a phone screen one uses luminosity because that makes both light sources easier to compare. It is also the measure most research on light effects work with. You could of course multiply the 1000lux of a bright phone display with its surface area in square meters if you prefer to calculate in lumens.
"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."
> 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.
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.
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).
I'm concerned by the fact that this response to blue LEDs, while founded on reasonable sounding theory theory, doesn't seem to have much high quality, real-world data AFAIK (e.g. insomnia in houses with blue LEDs vs not, comparisons between people using the glasses mentioned vs not, average bedtimes of people correlated with tv usage, any studies looking for causal links in day to day life, etc). Such studies might exist, but I don't think I've seen or heard them referenced, just mentions of how blue light decreases measured meletonin or what not in clinical settings. Mostly I just hear anecdotes from people who have fully bought into the line that this is a serious problem that requires time and money thrown at it about how awesome their life is now that they've gone out of their way to reduce blue light exposure, opening them right up to the placebo effect.
I'm double concerned since the answer for this seems to be "buy more stuff" and "blindly assume blue == bad without followup research or verification". This is one of those situations where it's pretty easy for companies to swoop in and offer at-best ineffective and at-worst actively harmful products to solve a problem that might or might not exist.
|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.
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...
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.
> there is no good evidence that filtering blue light with spectacles...
That's likely referencing this recent review[1]. The products referenced don't actually reduce blue light by much, which you can confirm in the studies. The lenses look transparent, not amber in many cases. Which makes sense because they're meant for all day use, but it's just a marketing thing.
If you bought glasses in person in the last 10 years, they probably tried to upsell a blue light or "screen strain reduction" filter.
It's a stretch to hold this as evidence that blue light doesn't affect us.
Retinal degeneration patients are all advised to avoid blue light exposure for this reason. Not only is there a great deal of research to back it up, but subjectively blue light also makes the photopsias and afterimages worse.
I think it's important to recognize that this is far from the only study pointing to this, and that similar problems are associated with CFL's.
For example, here is a 2014 study, "White Light–Emitting Diodes (LEDs) at Domestic Lighting Levels and Retinal Injury in a Rat Model" http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1307294/
Links to eye toxicity, macular degeneration, and blindness are not the only problems associated with new lighting either, which tends to be very heavy in the blue components. Lots of research links usage of blue-heavy white lighting to damaging circadian rhythms, which can lead to significant health effects. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110912092554.h...
> 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.
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