You are pregnant. After nine months, your bundle of joy finally arrives.
But as they open their eyes for the first time, you notice they are bluish in colour and somehow bigger than the ordinary size a baby should have.
To some, they think blueish eyes are beautiful but you are warned that on the contrary, that might be a sign of a medical condition in your baby.
A health expert has now called on parents whose babies are born with big blue eyes to take them for an eye review.
Dr Gideon Nderi, an ophthalmologist at the Kenyatta National Hospital says babies born with eyes bigger than the normal child’s eye which are bluish in colour could be a sign of glaucoma.
Nderi says that even though this is perceived by some people as ‘beautiful’ eyes, this is a result of pressure starting to build in the eyes of the child before they are born.
“In congenital glaucoma, the child is born with big blue eyes which are tearing and it is bad,” he says.
“They appear bluish because what happens is the pressure starts to build when the child is still not born and as a result, the eyes start to expand so when the child is born the eye is already expanded, it is big and blue.”
He, however, notes that it is more of a genetic issue and has nothing to do with what the mother was doing while she was pregnant.
He notes that 70 per cent of the children who get congenital glaucoma is not the fault of the mother or something that the mother would have prevented.
According to the medic, even though avoiding getting glaucoma might be very difficult, screening, and getting your eye pressure checked more often will go a long way in averting blindness associated with the disease.
Glaucoma is an eye disease that causes progressive and irreversible loss of eyesight.
Health experts have warned that even though everyone is at risk of getting glaucoma, some people are at higher risk of getting the disease.
They include people who are aged 35 years and above, those with a history of glaucoma in their family and those with diabetes mellitus.
Some of the symptoms of glaucoma include blurred or distorted vision, frequent change of reading glasses and headache.
