Shocked? Yes, this is what is called the Eye cancer or the cancer of the eye.
There are various types of eye cancer.
Some of them are retinoblastoma, melanoma and primary intraocular lymphoma.
Primary intraocular cancers are eye cancers that start inside the eyeball and secondary intraocular cancers are eye cancers that spread from some other part of the body (metastasize).
Both of these cancers more often start in other parts of the body. Over 90% of melanomas start in the skin, while lymphomas are more likely to begin in lymph nodes.
Age No Bar!! It is found that primary eye cancers can occur at any age, but most cases occur in people over age 50. Over the last 25 years the incidence of eye melanomas has been stable or may have dropped slightly.
Primary eye cancers are less common than cancers that spread to the eye from another part of the body (secondary eye cancers).
Watch Out! The various symptoms experienced by the patients of eye cancer are:
- A change in position of the eyeball within its socket
- bulging of the eye
- A change in the way the eye moves within the socket
- Pain is quite rare except in cases of massive spread outside the eye. In such a case, bulging or a change in the position of the eye may be noted.
- Decreased vision
- Floaters (spots or squiggles drifting in the field of vision) or flashes of light
- Visual field loss (losing part of your field of sight so that instead of seeing all around, you only see part of what is around you)
- A growing dark spot on the iris
The treatment depends on the advancement of the tumor. The most effective treatment is an enucleation, the removal of the eye if the tumor is in the advanced stages and there is little hope of regaining vision.
Maximum efforts are made to cure without this drastic treatment. Other eye surgeries include the following:
- Iridectomy – removal of part of the iris
- Choroidectomy – removal of part of the choroid
- Iridotrabeculectomy – removal of parts of the supporting tissues around the cornea and iris
- Iridocyclectomy – removal of parts of the ciliary body and parts of iris
If the tumor is small and there is a good chance that the vision will be restored, less drastic measures than the above surgeries are taken in eye cancer. Radiation and chemotherapy are two types of treatment that help in killing off the existing tumor and preventing its spread into other areas of the body.
Besides radiation and chemotherapy there are other methods of treating eye cancer. Thermotherapy uses heat to destroy the cancer cells. Cryotherapy uses extreme cold to destroy the cancer cells.
Photocoagulation uses a laser to destroy blood vessels that supply the tumor with nutrients. If the tumor isn’t advanced these are good options to treat it in order to avoid losing an eye.
So now you know how such a delicate part of your body Eye can even be affected by the dreadful disease cancer- Eye Cancer.
