Color Blindness

Color blindness refers to a person's inability to see red, green, blue or mixtures of these colors. Very few people with color blindness can see no colors at all. Although most often color blindness is inherited, it can also be acquired through injury or disease. Between 8 and 10 percent of males and less than 1 percent of females are afflicted by color blindness.

The ability to see color comes from three types of cone cells located in the retina. These cone cells distinguish between red, green and blue light, and all colors people see are variations of these three colors. Color blindness is the result of abnormal cone cells.

There are three types of inherited color blindness: anomalous trichromacy, which occurs when people have all three types of cone cells, but have an abnormal level of one type, allowing them to see all colors, just with greater difficulty than others; dichromacy, which occurs when one of the three types of cells is missing, most often creating difficulty distinguishing reds and greens; and achromatopsia or monochromatism, the most rare and severe form of color blindness, in which two of the three types of cone cells are missing. People with this type of color blindness usually can only see black, white and gray.

Acquired color blindness may occur as a result of aging, certain medications, injury and disease of the eye, including macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. Depending on the cause of color vision loss, it may be possible to reverse the damage.

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