How Your Heart's Health Can Affect Your Eyes

Your eye health is often an indicator of your overall health. This is primarily because cardiovascular issues can interfere with the amount of blood that reaches your eyes.

If your eyes don’t receive enough blood, this can cause vision problems. In many cases, cardiovascular problems are the root cause of health problems in other parts of your body.

Additionally, your eyes can reveal several systemic disorders, such as high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and diabetes. Because of this, it’s important to monitor your cardiovascular and vision health.

How Can Your Eyes Indicate Heart Problems?

The retina, the sensitive tissue at the back of your eye, is one of the few places doctors can directly view your blood vessels without invasive procedures.

These tiny retinal blood vessels closely reflect the condition of arteries elsewhere in your cardiovascular system, including those supplying your heart and brain. 

In fact, retinal damage is so closely tied to heart disease that early changes seen during a routine eye exam can predict cardiovascular events, like strokes and heart attacks, long before other symptoms appear.

Eye Conditions Linked to Poor Heart Health

When your cardiovascular system is compromised, your eyes often display clear warning signs. These include:

• Changes in the eye’s blood vessels, including their size
• Swelling at the head of the optic nerve
• Yellowish cholesterol deposits around the eyes (xanthelasma)
• Transient vision loss caused by sudden and brief constriction of blood vessels supplying the eyes
• Spots on the retina (also called cotton wool spots and exudates)
• Bleeding at the back of the eyes
• Swelling of the optic nerve and macula

If you or your eye doctor notice any of these signs during an eye exam, it’s important to seek medical attention from a heart health doctor or cardiologist.

Aside from these symptoms, certain eye conditions can also be related to poor heart health. These include:

• Hypertensive retinopathy. High blood pressure can narrow retinal arteries, sometimes giving them a silver-wire appearance. Small bleeds or cotton-wool spots (tiny retinal infarcts) can indicate severe hypertension and risk for future vision loss or stroke.
• Retinal artery occlusion. Atherosclerosis, or clogged arteries, may cause sudden, painless vision loss due to blockage in the retinal artery, acting like a stroke in your eye.
• Eye stroke (ocular embolism). Irregular heartbeat (atrial fibrillation) can send blood clots into the retinal vessels, leading to sudden visual impairment.
• Transient blurry vision. Heart failure and low blood flow can cause brief episodes of dim or blurry vision when you move from sitting to standing, signaling compromised circulation.

If you experience any of these conditions, contact a doctor immediately. Getting treatment as soon as possible can save your eyesight and prevent heart attacks or strokes.

Can a Stroke Cause Vision Changes?

Because of how your heart can affect your eyes, conditions like a stroke can significantly impact your vision. In fact, a variety of vision issues are linked to stroke, including:

• Visual field loss. Strokes trigger the development of brain lesions. When a lesion involves the brain's visual pathways, it causes hemianopia or other visual field loss. 
• Spatial inattention. Spatial inattention happens when someone neglects the side of their visual field affected by a stroke. This causes them to favor one side of their vision over the other.
• Double vision. Double vision causes loss of depth perception. Some people wear an eye patch after a stroke, but this only reduces the amount of information the brain has to process and doesn’t fix the problem.
• Visual midline shift. This condition causes the patient to perceive their center of balance as off to the side. Managing or resolving the issue involves balancing activities and special prism glasses.
• Oculomotor dysfunction. Oculomotor dysfunction refers to the eyes' inability to track or move smoothly between objects. It can lead to problems with reading and can affect walking and other movements.

How to Treat Eye Conditions Affected by Heart Health

Beta-blockers and ACE inhibitors effectively manage high blood pressure, while statins can lower cholesterol, preventing damage to the tiny vessels in your retina.

Listen In Q&A Format

How Your Heart's Health Can Affect Your Eyes

Vision Center Podcast

Additionally, there are various treatment methods for improving vision after a stroke, such as:

• Prism lenses. Shift incoming images toward intact retinal areas, helping patients detect objects in their blind field and navigate more safely. Often prescribed for visual-field loss and visual-midline shift.
• Scanning‐training eye-movement exercises. Teach deliberate, systematic sweeps of the eyes to “search” the missing field, improving reading speed and hazard detection after visual field loss.
• Reading-assist devices. Enlarge, scroll, or reflow text so that print stays within the patient’s remaining visual field, making sustained reading less fatiguing.
• Rehabilitation/therapy for spatial inattention. Occupational, physical, and vision-therapy drills retrain the brain to notice and use information from the neglected side of space.
• Eye patch. Covers one eye to reduce double images and visual overload, providing short-term relief while other therapies address alignment issues.
• Balance-retraining activities. Guided exercises recalibrate posture and weight distribution when a visual-midline shift makes patients feel off-center.
• Yoked prism glasses. A special prism pair that shifts the entire visual scene, recenters perceived midline, and can immediately improve balance and spatial orientation.
• Vision-therapy/oculomotor exercises. Targeted drills to strengthen tracking, fixation, and saccades, partially mitigating eye-movement disorders even when full recovery is unlikely.

Finally, if you have known cardiovascular risk factors, annual comprehensive eye exams are essential. Routine monitoring provides critical insights, helping detect subtle changes before they cause irreversible harm.

How to Prevent Eye Conditions Related to Heart Problems

It’s possible to improve your cardiovascular health through lifestyle changes. You can start making a difference today by:

• Quitting smoking. Smoking accelerates both cardiovascular damage and retinal artery disease.
• Lowering your cholesterol. High cholesterol contributes to clogged arteries in both your heart and eyes. A diet rich in leafy greens, whole grains, and cold-water fish provides antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids beneficial to retinal vessels.
• Boosting your physical activity. Regular exercise improves retinal vessel health, reducing your overall cardiovascular risk.
• Managing sleep apnea. Treatment not only reduces blood-pressure spikes but also relieves stress on your optic nerve, potentially decreasing the risk of permanent vision loss.

By making these lifestyle changes, you invest in both clearer vision and a healthier heart.diabetes. Because of this, it’s important to monitor your cardiovascular and vision health.