How Often Should You Get an Eye Exam?

Here are nine reasons to make eye checkups a priority:

1. There’s more to your eye than meets the eye

With dilation, drops added to the eye widen the pupil, allowing your doctor to view the inside of the eye — including the retina, lens and optic nerve — and look for age-related macular degeneration, melanomas and glaucoma. “Examining an undilated eye is like looking through a keyhole into a room. Dilation opens the door completely, so you can see all the corners of the room,” says optometrist Laura Di Meglio, an assistant professor at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. Dilation is usually included in the price of your eye exam. For an extra fee, though, some private practices offer testing on newer retinal-imaging devices.

“These machines capture a wide view of the retina, even with undilated eyes,” Di Meglio says. The wider view of the retina allows the doctor to see the sides of the eyeballs and detect abnormalities that may otherwise be missed with standard testing.

2. Eyes are a window into your health

“The eye is the only place in the body where you can directly visualize nerves and blood vessels,” Wisner explains. Eye doctors scan your eye for conditions that affect blood vessels, including hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes — and can sometimes be the first to detect a problem.

“Heart disease still remains one of the biggest causes of morbidity and mortality in our country, and if we pick up on it early enough, we can get on top of it and prevent damage,” he says.

3. A vision exam is brain-healthy, too

What’s healthy for the eyes is healthy for the brain. Vision problems are associated with a higher risk of memory and thinking problems. In fact, older adults with moderate or severe distance vision impairment or blindness had 72 percent higher odds of dementia compared to those without, according to a study in JAMA Ophthalmology. (Most types of untreated vision problems were associated with dementia.) Vision problems can be found — and addressed — at your eye doctor’s office. For example, you can get a prescription for glasses or be evaluated for cataract surgery.

4. You can stop switching glasses to read the paper

Even if you don’t have a prescription for glasses, you still need an annual vision exam. Around age 40, people naturally begin to develop presbyopia, a condition in which the lens of the eye loses its ability to change shape and accommodate for different distances. “You can’t read things up close anymore, so you hold materials at an arm’s distance. But by age 55, most can’t struggle through it — their arm just isn’t long enough anymore,” Di Meglio says. Drugstore readers might suffice, but talk to your doctor about prescription readers or progressive lenses, which can improve depth perception. (Progressives take some getting used to, so inform your doctor if you’re at risk for falls.)

5. The latest contacts could change the way you see

Use your yearly eye exam as an opportunity to discuss if there are contact lens options that can make your life easier. New materials can improve comfort and let contact lenses solve more than one vision issue at a time. For example, toric lenses can treat astigmatism, orthokeratology lenses help reshape the cornea to correct myopia (near-sightedness), and multifocal contacts combine multiple prescriptions in one lens.

6. You may be able to ditch wearing glasses forever

Eye tests over 60 include screening for cataracts. A clouding of the lens of the eye, a cataract can develop so slowly that you may not notice the difference initially. For some, cataracts begin to grow in their 50s, or even at age 40. By age 80, more than half of Americans have had one. But cataract surgery can liberate some people from glasses altogether, Wisner says. The procedure is quick (one hour), downtime is short (no more than a few days), and new techniques mean that some people won’t need post-op eye drops.

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7. You don’t need to drive with glare

If night driving is becoming increasingly challenging, ask about antireflective lenses for your glasses, optometrist Barbara Horn suggests. “If your eyes are healthy with no or minimal cataracts, antireflective lenses are the most common solution,” she says. That said, for folks who are over age 75, nighttime driving almost doubles the risk of being injured in a traffic accident, research suggests. At an annual vision exam, your eye care provider can talk to you about ways to make driving at night — or during the day — safer and make sure you’re being treated for any eye-related diseases.

8. Those eye floaters could signal something bigger

Regardless of how recently you’ve been to the eye doctor, you should also schedule a visit for an eye exam when something feels wrong with your vision. For example, with aging, the gel-like substance in the eyes, called the vitreous, begins to shrink; it may even separate from the retina, says Elena Roth, M.D., an ophthalmologist with the University of Miami Health System. One symptom of this might be seeing floaters and flashes in your vision. Most of the time you won’t need to be treated for floaters, but you will need to be closely followed by your doctor to watch for a retinal tear, a complication that can lead to vision loss.

The good news is that those floaters usually stop bothering you eventually. “After three to six months, the brain learns to adjust and accommodate them,” Roth says.

9. If you have diabetes, see your eye doctor — it’s critical

If you have diabetes, you have a 25-fold higher risk of developing blindness compared to the general population. Here’s where the importance of eye exams comes in: Most of that vision loss can be prevented when you see your ophthalmologist regularly to catch problems as they start. How often should you go to the eye doctor if you have diabetes? Every year.

“Diabetes is a disease of blood vessels. In the eye, it causes bleeding and leakage of fluid in the retina, which can cause loss of vision,” Wisner says. That’s why an annual dilated exam is crucial. What’s going on in your eyes is a direct reflection of what’s happening in your kidneys, he adds; if a vision exam shows diabetes is not well controlled, you have an opportunity to take steps to preserve your eyesight — and the rest of your body.