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Is making an appointment for a comprehensive eye exam for your children on your back-to-school checklist? It needs to be.
No amount of new clothes, backpacks, or supplies will allow your child to reach their potential in school if they have an undetected vision problem.
The difference between eye exams and vision screenings
An annual exam done by an eye doctor is more focused than a visual screening done at school. School screenings are simply "pass-fail tests" that are often limited to measuring a child’s sight clarity and visual acuity up to a distance of 20 feet. But this can provide a false sense of security.
There are important differences between a screening and a comprehensive eye exam.
Where a screening tests only for visual acuity, comprehensive exams will test for acuity, chronic diseases, color vision, and eye tracking. This means a child may pass a vision screening at school because they are able to see the board, but they may not be able to see the words in the textbook in front of them.
Why back-to-school eye exams matter
Did you know that 1 out of 4 children has an undiagnosed vision problem because changes in their eyesight go unrecognized?
Myopia, or nearsightedness, is a common condition in children and often develops around the ages of 6 or 7. And nearsightedness can change very quickly, especially between the ages of 11 and 13, which means that an eye prescription can change rapidly over a short period of time. That’s why
Read more: This Might Just Be the Most Important Test Your Child Will Take
Have you ever heard of Charles Bonnet? He was a Swiss naturalist, philosopher, and biologist (1720-1793) who first described the hallucinatory experiences of his 89-year-old grandfather, who was nearly blind in both eyes from cataracts. Charles Bonnet Syndrome is now the term used to describe simple or complex hallucinations in people who have impaired vision.
Symptoms
People who experience these hallucinations know they aren't real. These hallucinations are only visual, and they don't involve any other senses. These images can be simple patterns or more complex, like faces or cartoons. They are more common in people who have retinal conditions that impair their vision, like macular degeneration, but they can occur with any condition that damages the visual pathway. The prevalence of Charles Bonnet Syndrome among adults 65 years and older with significant vision loss is reported to be between 10% and 40%. This condition is probably under reported because people may be worried about being labeled as having a psychiatric condition.
Causes
The causes of these hallucinations are controversial, but the most supported theory is deafferentation, which in this case is the loss of signals from the eye to the brain; then, in turn, the visual areas of the brain discharge neural signals to create images to fill the void. This is similar to the phantom limb syndrome, when a person feels pain where a limb was once present. In general, the images that are produced by the brain are usually pleasant and non-threatening.
Treatment and prognosis
If there is a reversible cause of
Read more: Charles Bonnet Syndrome and Visual Hallucinations
