A Teen Boy ’s Diet of Fries and Sausage Led to Blindness, According to a New Case Study

A new case study highlights a serious, though rare, side effect of a poor diet: blindness. In the Annals of Internal Medicine, a group of researchers from the University of Bristol in the U.K. report the unusual case of a teenage boy whose diet was so poor, it led to serious optic nerve damage and vision loss. The boy first reported fatigue to his doctors when he was 14. He was deficient in vitamin B12 but had few other health issues, so he received only vitamin B12 injections and dietary counseling. The next year, he began to experience hearing and vision disturbances, but doctors were unable to find a clear cause. After two years of worsening eyesight and eventual blindness, the boy was referred to a neuro-ophthalmologist. At that time, doctors found signs of continuing vitamin B12 deficiency, as well as other nutritional deficiencies—and, upon interviewing the boy about his diet, found that “since elementary school, he would not eat certain textures of food.” The patient was mostly subsisting on french fries, Pringles, white bread, ham and sausage, according to the case report. Diet-related vision loss is fairly common among populations where poverty and food insecurity are widespread. When it occurs among people in developed nations, it’s typically related to an inability to absorb certain nutrients, or combined with alcohol or tobacco use. A purely diet-related case of vision loss is rare—especially in a young, otherwise healthy patient liv...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Diet/Nutrition Source Type: news