Floaters--tiny particles in your field of vision--are an irksome consequence of aging.

Oct. 05--Georgina Almeda, a retired secretary and teacher from Coral Gables, kept seeing gnats on her mangoes.

"Guasasas," she calls the critters in Spanish.

She tried swatting them off, to no avail.

Next, Almeda started to see what looked like a backward C with a dot on each end in her line of vision. Then, she saw "a cobweb." She thought it might be a reflection of her mascara, but she was concerned enough to see an eye doctor.

What Almeda was seeing are called floaters -- harmless, tiny particles inside the eye that become visible when they enter your line of vision -- another one of those irksome but normal consequences of aging.

"It's often very disconcerting for people," says Dr. Sander R. Dubovy, an ophthalmologist at the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami. "What happens is that people don't know about them and they're bothersome, but they're a normal part of aging."

Most of the time floaters appear at about age 60, "plus or minus a few years," depending on your vision history, Dubovy says.

Near-sighted people may get them earlier. So might people prone to eye infections.

Floaters occur when the eye's gel-like lining, the vitreous, begins to change consistency, and small bits of it break loose. Those gel particles float around the liquid center of the vitreous, casting shadows on the retina as light passes through the eye.

"When this jelly starts to liquefy, it changes consistency and can pull away from the retina," Dubovy says. "When that happens you can see more floaters.

"It's like a piece of Scotch tape you put on a wall and it looks clear, but if you pull it off, it takes a little paper with it and the tape becomes cloudy."

The floaters move when your eyes move.

"It pulls off a little bit of pigment tissue when it detaches from the retina," Dubovy says. "It sits in the center of vision, and reading or focusing on something becomes a problem."

You see the floaters more often in bright light and when you look down.

Most people require no treatment -- but if your floaters are accompanied by a flash of light, you need to see a doctor immediately. That flash could mean the detachment has caused a tear in the retina. A small tear is easy to fix with a laser, Dubovy says.

"If you catch it early, you should be fine," he says. "If you wait some time, it can lead to more problems."

A 2009 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that one in seven people who experience sudden eye floaters and flashes will have a retinal tear or detachment.

But here's the good news: For most people, floaters go away within months.

"These things become less bothersome over time," Dubovy says. "They may dissolve a little bit or settle down. The third thing is that the brain tends to get used to them and blocks them out. The eye adapts."

There are a few things you can do to cope with floaters while they're with you:

--If they appear when you put your head down to read, elevate the book by propping it on a book stand.

"Get it out of your central area of vision," Dubovy recommends. "Shift where your head is."
--Look straight ahead when you're watching TV.

"When you're sitting up they settle to the bottom part of the eye and they're not in the central area of vision," the doctor says.

There isn't any treatment for floaters because only in "very rare" cases do they become crippling, and the risk of surgery for a normal case of floaters far outweighs the benefits
.
"It gets better more than 99 percent of the time," Dubovy says. "The key thing is see a doctor to make sure you don't have retinal tear."

Unlike most diseases, there's nothing you can do to prevent floaters.

"If you live to a decent age," he says, "you'll experience them."

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