Traumatic Brain Injuries and Vision Therapy
With brain injuries on the rise in recent years, it is important to know the damage caused to the vision system resulting from the incidents. Traumatic brain injuries or TBI’s refer to injuries such as concussions and strokes. These injuries can cause many new visual symptoms that the patient has never experienced, and many are overlooked at the initial evaluation after the injury has occurred. Many of the rehabilitation centers for patients with these injuries are unaware of the visual consequences following a traumatic brain injury, causing these symptoms to be neglected and making it harder to treat.
Some of symptoms patients experience include:
- Blurry Vision
- Sensitivity to light
- Reading: decrease fluency, speed and comprehension
- Words appear to move or change when reading
- Headaches with reading or other visual tasks
- Hard to concentrate or hold attention on something
- Memory difficulty
- Double Vision
- Loss of visual field
These brain injuries affect all aspects of vision including eye tracking skills, fixation, depth perception, central peripheral vision, visual acuity, and eye teaming skills. When these skills are neglected in therapy after an injury, the patient can be left frustrated from lack of improvement overall. With the help of vision therapy, the flow of information from the visual system to the brain can be improved causing a more complete recovery of the patient.
Therapy will consist of helping connect the pathways weakened by the injury through many techniques that aid eye teaming, eye tracking and visual processing activities. Prisms and lenses are also used to help gain back field loss that was lost due to the injury. Many success stories have been reported after a traumatic brain injury through the help of vision therapy. If these symptoms are not overlooked after the injury, the patient just might be able to have a better recovery, and gain their life back!
More information and success stories can be found at: http://www.braininjuries.org/brain_injury_double_vision.html