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Your health: Poor quality sunglasses may harm your eyes

Cheap sunglasses may harm eyes

Your choice of sunglasses can have a bigger impact on your eye health than you might realize.

Eye specialists are warning not to use poor quality UV sunglasses because they may harm your eyes and create long-term vision defects, The Nation reports.

Professor Dr Khalid Wahid says that sunglasses are a form of protective eyewear meant to prevent bright and high energy light from damaging or discomforting the eyes.

But, if you're wearing a cheap pair that do not have polarization, UVA and UVB filters, it may result in eye irritation, tears, visual distortion, headaches, and blurred vision.

"Wearing full dark sunglasses will increase pressure on eyes and as a result the pupil opens up by half mm to 5 mm to catch the proper vision and which also allows dangerous UVA and UVB light rays into eyes which may damage them," Dr. Wahid said.

Death rates from heart disease decline

The death rate from heart disease and stroke in the United States declined 50 percent over the last 35 years, according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The study examined death certificates from people in 3,110 counties and found that from 1980 to 2014 the death rate from cardiovascular diseases fell from 507 deaths per 100,000 people to 253 deaths per 100,000 people - a relative decline of 50 percent.

However, the study found that there are stunning differences in the death rates across the country - and doctors don't fully understand what's responsible for the huge disparities, American Heart Association News reports.

"I was most surprised by how large the differences in the death rates were," said Dr. Gregory Roth, M.D., an assistant professor in the cardiology division of the University of Washington, who was the lead researcher of the study. "There are counties that are just getting left behind and not seeing the benefits we've made in treating heart disease."

Overall, the counties with the largest concentration of deaths from cardiovascular diseases extended from southeastern Oklahoma along the Mississippi River Valley to eastern Kentucky. Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia and Texas were also home to numerous counties with high cardiovascular disease death rates.

The regions with the lowest death rates from cardiovascular diseases included the San Francisco area, central Colorado, northern Nebraska and central Minnesota.

An individual in Franklin Parish, Louisiana, is 13 times more likely to die from ischemic heart disease than someone from Pitkin County, Colorado.

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