Tritanopia: All About Blue-Yellow Color Blindness

Everyone sees the world differently, but sometimes, those differences can be more than just opinions. While vision problems like needing reading glasses are often obvious, color blindness can go unnoticed. In fact, many people don’t realize they’re color blind until later in life.

If you’re starting to wonder if you see things differently from others — literally — a good place to start is learning about the different types of color blindness. This can prove just as helpful if you’ve recently been diagnosed with color blindness.

In this article, we’ll talk about tritanopia and demystify a condition that’s more common than you may realize.

What Is Color Blindness?

Color blindness, or color vision deficiency, means your eyes perceive color differently from other people. That can make it hard to spot the differences between specific colors, and it usually affects greens, reds, and blues.

How Does Color Blindness Work?

If you want to understand color blindness, you need to know how your retina works. There are two types of retinal cells used to detect light: rods and cones. Rods perceive light and dark, while cone cells detect color.

Cone cells are clustered around the center of your vision. Three types of cones perceive color:

• S-Cones: These are your blue cones. They absorb short wavelengths to allow you to perceive blue light.
• M-Cones: These absorb medium wavelengths, allowing you to see green light.
• L-Cones: These enable you to receive the color red.

Your brain takes the information from your cone cells to decide what you see. If all of your cones work correctly, you have trichromatic vision. That means you perceive all colors.

If, however, one cone type is damaged or missing, it’s known as dichromacy or color blindness. Since any or all of your cones may be missing or damaged, color blindness exists on a spectrum.

There are different degrees of color blindness, from mild cases, where you might simply struggle to make out colors in low light, to severe color blindness, where your eyes don’t perceive certain colors at all.

What Is Tritanopia?

Tritanopia is a type of color blindness. It’s a less common deficiency, also known as blue-yellow color vision deficiency. That doesn’t mean only blue and yellow are affected, however. Rather, tritanopia makes it hard to tell the difference between blue and yellow while also making colors that contain blue and yellow pigments difficult to identify.

Those with tritanopic vision are unable to see the differences between blue and green, yellow and pink, and purple and red. It can also make colors look less vibrant than they otherwise would.

If you have tritanopia, your red and green vision is normal otherwise. However, tritanopia isn’t associated with any additional vision problems.

For example, just because you’re color blind doesn’t mean you’ll experience vision loss. It’s completely possible to be color blind and have otherwise perfect vision.

What Are Other Types of Color Blindness?

If you’ve been diagnosed with tritanopia, you’re a rare bird in the world of ophthalmology. Tritanopia falls into tritan color blindness or blue-yellow color blindness. This is the rarest category of color vision deficiency and includes both tritanopia and the even rarer tritanomaly.

There are two other categories of color blindness:

• Deutan Color Blindness: This is the most common form of red-green color blindness. Deuteranomaly and deuteranopia fall into this category.
• Protan Color Blindness: This is also a red-green color vision deficiency, meaning your red L-cones are missing or damaged. Protanomaly and protanopia fall into this category.

How To Know if You Have Tritanopia

As we’ve touched on, it’s possible to have color blindness and not even know it for much of your life. That might be because you have a mild case, but it can also be because you’ve unknowingly adapted so well you don’t experience any difficulties.

In general, the main symptom of color blindness is intuitive: You don’t see colors correctly. If you notice that the way you see colors tends to change depending on the lighting, that’s a common symptom.

Struggling to tell the difference between different shades of blue or other colors can also be a giveaway.

Color blindness is most often identified in children when they struggle to learn colors. While they’ll adapt, it can be incredibly frustrating to struggle with something that others find easy. As such, don’t hesitate to speak to your child’s optometrist so that accommodations can be made.

What Causes Tritanopia?

For the most part, color blindness is a congenital condition — you’re born with it. Most color blindness is an X-linked genetic condition, so it’s caused by a mutation in the X chromosome. Because men only have one X chromosome, color blindness presents most often in men. It usually remains recessive in women, so it’s common for it to pass from mother to son.

Tritanopia, however, is not X-linked, so it presents equally in men and women. While it’s one of the rarer types of color blindness, tritanopia is a more common type of color blindness in women for this reason.

Though rarer, color blindness can also develop later in life. It won’t naturally develop, so if you notice a sudden difference in your color perception, speak to your doctor right away.

Color vision problems later in life are caused mainly by disease and trauma. Conditions like macular degeneration, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, and even alcoholism can lead to a change in your vision.

Cataracts, too, can cause colors to shift or lose their vibrancy. While this isn’t color blindness per se, it can have a similar effect.

How Are You Diagnosed With Tritanopia?

Your doctor can diagnose all forms of color blindness. If you suspect you might have color blindness or are simply curious, you can find apps or search for the Ishihara test.

The Ishihara test is a simple, low-stress way to get a better idea of potential color deficiencies. All you have to do is identify the numbers embedded in a circle of colored dots. If you struggle to see the numbers, there’s a good chance you have some kind of color blindness.

Of course, take any online tests with a grain of salt. It’s always possible you’ve stumbled upon a prank or need to turn the brightness on your monitor up. Still, it can be a useful first step that you can do from your couch.

Even if you haven’t noticed any symptoms and color blindness runs in your family, it’s worth bringing up at your next eye exam. You should also mention this to your child’s eye doctor so they can be tested.

Can You Treat Tritanopia?

Ultimately, there is no cure for color vision deficiency. That said, most people adjust. That’s why it’s so common for folks to go years without even realizing that they’re color blind. While it might make for interesting outfit choices, color blindness isn’t likely to cause severe life issues.

While a diagnosis won’t lead to treatment, it can make it easier to seek accommodations. Small adjustments in your personal or professional life can also help you tell the difference between colors.

What About Color Blindness Glasses?

You’ve probably seen social media videos of people wearing special glasses that seem to magically restore the full spectrum of colors to their vision.

These glasses are real, but they don’t restore normal vision. Instead, they can help make colors more vibrant and noticeable, allowing you to tell them apart. They can even allow some people to identify new colors.

These glasses primarily work for people with red-green color blindness, the most common type. They block out certain colors, allowing you to see the remaining colors more clearly. If you have red-green color blindness, these glasses might be an option for you.

A Clearer View With Pair

Whether you’ve been diagnosed with tritanopia, think you have it, or are concerned your child might be color blind, learning more about color blindness is an important step in your journey toward clear vision.

The more you know about the condition, the more options you have at your disposal. While tritanopia isn’t treatable, there are ways to make life easier. Start by speaking to your optometrist or ophthalmologist about a color-blind test to get a clearer view of your options. Once you have your prescription, bring it back to the pros at Pair.

Sources:

Types of Color Vision Deficiency | National Eye Institute

Color Blindness | nei.gov

Color Vision Deficiency | MedlinePlus

Efficiency of the Ishihara Test for Identifying Red-Green Color Deficiency | National Library of Medicine