Emerging evidence of metabolic vulnerability to visible blue light is vitally important, as it is indicative of a scalable threshold effect. Added stressors (e.g., increased altitude or contact lens wear) could shift the wavelength effects toward a more damaging clinical picture. Recent reports have indicated rod photo-pigment damage resulting from solar blue-light exposures, adversely affecting unaided night vision, a militarily important performance decrement. The activation wavelength for the daily synchronous setting of the Circadian Clock, which regulates the synchronization of all hormonal and organ systems throughout the body, falls within this blue light perceptual range.

Date Published: 13 May 2016
PDF: 16 pages
Proc. SPIE 9839, Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2016, 98390V (13 May 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2219993

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9839:
Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2016
Jack Sanders-Reed; Jarvis J. Arthur III, Editor(s)