What Are Eye Floaters? Plus Symptoms, Causes And Treatment

Bleeding In the Eye

An individual who has bleeding in the eye can see eye floaters as a result. Bleeding or hemorrhage into the vitreous can be caused by many factors including eye injury, brain bleed, obstructed blood vessels in the eye, diabetic neuropathy, posterior vitreous detachment, and sickle cell disease. In healthy individuals, light is taken in by the cornea or transparent layer on top of the pupil and iris. Light is then focused and passes through the clear vitreous into the individual's retina in the back of their eye. The retina is the eye lining responsible for sensing and capturing light rays that enter the eye. The retina transcribes the light into impulses that move through more than a million nerve fibers that feed to the individual's optic nerve. The optic nerve then sends this visual information to the visual centers in the brain so they can form an image. However, this process is disrupted when there is a bleed or hemorrhage in an individual's vitreous humor. The red blood cells in the leaked blood cause holes in the light and image information that is sent to the optical nerve. The result is the appearance of eye floaters.

Certain Eye Medications

Certain eye medications injected with a syringe into the eye may cause an individual to see floaters. There are a number of conditions that warrant this type of medication delivery, including macular edema, uveitis, endophthalmitis, wet or dry macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, and retinal vein occlusion. The floaters are the result of two different factors involving injected medications. The syringe may contain a coating on it comprised of silicone oil. This silicone oil may disperse from the needle into the vitreous. The oil droplets then appear as floaters in the patient's vision until their body absorbs them. The other mechanism involves how the syringe is prepared before the injection of medication. A technique called priming is used to help reduce the risk of air bubbles being injected into the tissue along with the medicine. When air bubbles are injected into the vitreous, they may appear in the patient's vision as floaters. While priming the syringe cannot prevent air bubbles, it reduces the chance of resulting floaters.