http://babieswithglasses.org/
I remember a specific incident in the seventh grade when my old drama teacher brought her baby boy to school for the first time. Baby James was almost a year old, and the as most babies are, the most adorable baby ever. However, the first thing I noticed about the baby was that he wore eyeglasses, which I thought was really odd at the time because I couldn’t understand why or how a doctor would diagnose an 10 month baby with eye problems when the baby couldn’t even talk.
I now understand the importance of good vision in children for development, not only of the visual system itself, but also of the higher cortical structures involved with vision. If problems in the visual system aren’t addressed early in childhood, they can lead to more severe damage in the visual system that can much harder to fix later in life. While looking more into this topic online, doctors emphasized again and again the importance of taking children to an ophthalmologist as well as a pediatrician very early and keeping up with their visual screenings. Vision problems in children are very often overlooked and can cause children to do poorly in school and even develop other problems such as headaches. A statistic I found online said that 1 out of 4 children have a visual need!
So back to my topic of Baby James, I was very interested to learn how a doctor might diagnose eye problems in non-verbal children, and I found this AWESOME site that breaks it all down pretty well. It explains how pediatric ophthalmologists can measure the visual acuity of such children with the use of toys, pictures, or a Teller acuity tester, which “helps us check your child’s eyesight even if your child can’t talk. This test involves using striped cards behind a puppet stage to determine if your child sees finer and finer stripes.” The most common visual condition diagnosed in children seems to be Strabismus, which is the generic term for any misalignment of the two eyes, including esotropia, exotropia, hypertropia, and hypotropia. Sometimes these conditions can be treated by eyeglasses, but other times, eye muscle surgery may be necessary to realign the eyes.
Another important condition the website addresses is amblyopia, which is the abnormal development of the area of the brain responsible for vision, resulting in one or both eyes seeing poorly. There are many reasons for amblyopia and the condition affects 2% of the general population, causing more loss of vision in young people than all eye diseases and trauma combined. The site again emphasizes the importance of early detection and treatment, especially in the case of amblyopia, which it describes very well with the analogy of a camera:
“Amblyopia develops in childhood, when the connections between the eyes and the brain are developing. The brain must learn how to put together information sent from two eyes and make one picture. If the image from one eye is clear and the other blurry, or if the eyes are misaligned and send two different pictures, the brain will ignore the picture sent from one eye. Amblyopia results when the brain consistently ignores the information from the one eye. The appearance of the affected eye may be perfectly normal, yet its vision will be abnormal. Using the analogy of the eye as a camera and the brain as the photo-processing machinery, the problem causing amblyopia is not that the camera (eye) is defective, but that the photo processor (brain) is not properly developing the ‘film’ it receives….It is often necessary to patch the good eye so that the partially sighted eye is used. This is called occlusion therapy or patching therapy. This is an attempt to stimulate that part of the brain that has been suppressed or ‘turned off’ by a blurred image.”
