Lightning Bolt Flashes In Vision

Causes of light flashes in the eye.

Lightning bolt flashes in vision.

People often say seeing flashes of light is like seeing shooting stars or lightning streaks flashes of light in your vision come from inside your eye. Flashes in your eye are a type of photopsia or vision disturbance. Lori tindel kahn westmed ophthalmologist. It is important to distinguish the nature of the flash as one type of flash is very brief and transient like a lightning bolt and other flashes are more continuous and can last for minutes or hours.

That looks like a series of small red or dark coloured spots a cobweb thread of cotton a mosquito or fly in your vision contact and consult your eye care professional as soon as. If you re seeing flashing lights in your eyes persistently however you may need to. If you have a recent onset of flashes of light e g. They are not caused by lights or anything else outside of your body.

Flashing lights in vision can appear in the corner of the eye in one s peripheral vision or as floaters that appear to drift in the air and have a variety of causes. The sudden onset of seeing spots or cobwebs in the eyes or lightning flashes out of the corner of the eye lasting a split second is one of the most common concerns that patients bring to ophthalmologists in the office and even to the emergency room. Wang describes them as split second bright white disturbances in the vision that people often describe as a lightning bolt. Flashes of light can happen in one or both of your eyes and have different shapes colors frequency and duration.

They can look like arcs or small streaks and come and go very quickly sometimes just at the corner of the eye. Photopsia is the symptom of seeing flashes of light and is essentially harmless but it may be a sign of more serious complications elsewhere in the body that. This is rarely seen as a normal visual phenomenon throughout life. Often times substance in the inner rear portion of the eye breaks loose causing floaters.

Flashing is a symptom of seeing a flash of light in the vision. Possible eye emergency flashes of light and floaters in the vision optometry march 24 2014.