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Hydroxychloroquine (Plaquenil) was originally used to treat malaria and is now commonly used to treat rheumatological and dermatological diseases. It is frequently used for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and Lupus and is often very effective in mitigating the joint and arthritic symptoms these diseases can cause.
One of the most significant side effects of the drug is its possibility of causing eye problems resulting in blurred or decreased vision. The most common issue is damage to the retina. It can impair color vision or damage the retinal cells, particularly in the area right around the central vision.
In your retina, the area that you use to look straight at an object is called the fovea. The fovea is the area that provides you with the most definition when looking at an object. The area just around the fovea is called the macula and it has the ability to see objects with slightly less definition than the fovea but significantly better than the rest of your retina, which accounts for your peripheral vision. The most common place for hydroxychloroquine to cause a problem is in a ring of the macula surrounding the fovea.
The reason it is important to detect any of these changes as early as possible is because in many instances the changes are not reversible even if you come off the medication.
The risk of this happening is highly correlated with the cumulative dose of the drug you have received. So, the higher the dose
The Centers for Disease Control estimates that around 2.8 million people in the United States suffer from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) every year, and vision can be affected. Concussions are a type of TBI.
The rate of childhood TBI visits to the emergency department more than doubled between 2001 and 2009, making children more likely than any other group to go to the ER with concussion symptoms.
It was once assumed that the hallmark of a concussion was a loss of consciousness. More recent evidence, however, does not support that. In fact, the majority of people diagnosed with a concussion do not experience any loss of consciousness. The most common immediate symptoms are amnesia and confusion.
There also are multiple visual symptoms that can occur with a concussion, either initially or during the recovery phase.
Visual symptoms after a concussion include:
Blurred vision.
Difficulty reading.
Double vision.
Light sensitivity.
Headaches accompanying visual tasks.
Loss of peripheral vision.
Most people with visual complaints after a concussion have 20/20 distance visual acuity, so more specific testing of near acuity, convergence amplitudes, ocular motility, and peripheral vision must be done.
In a study done at the Minds Matter Concussion Program at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, patients with a concussion diagnosis underwent extensive vision testing, which assessed symptoms, visual acuity, eye alignment, near point of convergence, vergence amplitude and facility, accommodative amplitude and facility, and saccadic eye movement speed and accuracy.
A total of 72 children (mean age 14.6 years) were examined, and 49 (68%) of those
