If your eyes are suddenly feeling dry and scratchy, a lifestyle change may have precipitated dry eye. Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Dry eye is just what it sounds like, a syndrome that produces the sensation of dry eyes. Lauren Gormley, an optometrist at Johns Hopkins, says conditions may have been right for you to develop the condition but a lifestyle change may have been the precipitating factor.

Gormley: One of the first things that you assess when you're doing a dry eye evaluation is if there is anything that has changed. That could be lifestyle changes, so that could be somebody who wasn't doing 8 to 10 hours of computer work a day now has changed jobs doing 8 to 10 hours of computer work a day and their tier film isn't healthy enough or stable enough to handle that screen time. What looking at screens does and that can be computer screen, cell phone screens, iPads, your blink rate and the quality of your blink will decrease consistently. That's the type of lifestyle factor that can come in and all of a sudden it feels like you have dry eye.    :33 

Gormley says regardless of what caused the condition to show up, evaluation is important to make sure there’s nothing more serious going on, and to personalize a management approach. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.