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Medical Author:

John D. Sheppard, MD, MMSc

Coauthor:

David M. Salib, MD

Medical Editor:

Andrew A. Dahl, MD, FACS

Andrew A. Dahl, MD, FACS

Andrew A. Dahl, MD, is a board-certified ophthalmologist. Dr. Dahl's educational background includes a BA with Honors and Distinction from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, and an MD from Cornell University, where he was selected for Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor society. He had an internal medical internship at the New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center.

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The outlook for benign floaters is highly positive. For pathologic floaters, early detection and appropriate treatment with the highly sophisticated tools available to modern medicine also portend a generally favorable prognosis in uncomplicated cases.

Benign eye floaters generally do not disappear completely. The vitreous gel and its protein remain within the eye for life. However, the density of floaters often decreases with time and decreases more rapidly with the separation or if PVD is complete and the posterior vitreous face has been completely removed from the optic nerve. In addition, some patients only notice their floaters in bright lighting conditions or in situations where there is a bright homogenous white background, such as looking out an airplane window or into a microscope. Some PVD patients notice extra "microbes swimming around" when looking at a microscope slide from a routine clinical specimen for example. Furthermore, the brain becomes accommodated to the presence of floaters and learns to ignore them in everyday life. This adaptation to the presence of the floaters renders the condition less bothersome or annoying.

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