Adults and Binocular Vision Dysfunction – Village Eye Centre in North Edmonton

Binocular visual dysfunction (BVD) is a condition that affects people of all ages. It occurs when your eyes cannot align with each other properly, causing them to send inconsistent visual information to the brain. The brain then has to strain to correct the misalignment and combine this visual information into a coherent image. This extra effort may cause symptoms including:

• Dizziness
• Nausea
• Seeing double
• Neck pain
• Reading problems
• Difficulty with depth perception
• Anxiety
• Tension
• Blurry vision
• Imbalance

BVD can also cause headaches, called ocular migraines, that are accompanied by mild to severe visual symptoms, including:

• Temporary blindness (partial or total)
• Flashes of light
• Zig-zag or squiggly lines appearing in the visual field
• Color blindness
• Poor peripheral vision

Only a functional vision exam can diagnose the problems that can detrimentally affect quality-of-life by ensuring that all essential visual skills are working correctly. After your functional eye exam, your eye doctor will create a vision therapy regimen to help retrain your eyes and brain to work together more efficiently.

Contact Village Eye Centre today for a functional eye exam, or visit us with your concerns, and we’ll determine the best course of action to treat your visual problems.

Village Eye Centre serves patients from Edmonton, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, and Fort Saskatchewan all throughout Alberta.

Experiencing BVD or Other Visual Symptoms After A Brain Injury?

A neuro-optometrist can treat visual, perceptual, and motor problems that may arise following brain injury or trauma, such as a concussion. All too often, the root cause of these symptoms isn’t accurately identified as a visual processing issue— and this may hinder the patient’s ability to recover.

Ocular conditions that can arise following a brain injury and trauma include:

• Vestibular Dysfunction – hypersensitivity to visual motion which is commonly associated with headaches and motion sickness.
• Acquired Strabismus – also known as “crossed-eyes.” Occurs when the eyes do not align properly.
• Convergence and/or accommodative insufficiency – Difficulty paying attention or focusing on near or far objects for long periods of time.
• Visual-spatial dysfunction/visual processing disorder – a disrupted sense of where objects are in space. Difficulty in detecting differences in shapes or letters.
• Oculomotor Dysfunction – characterized by issues with balance, reading comprehension and speed, writing, and any other focused visual task.
• Nystagmus – a condition where the eyes repeatedly make uncontrolled movements.
• Post Traumatic Vision Syndrome – may result in reading difficulties (as words will seem to run together), blurry or double vision. Symptoms may not appear for days, weeks, or even months after the incident.
• Hemianopsia/Visual Neglect—losing half of your visual field from either side.

The visual perceptual deficits following brain injury or trauma may have dramatic effects on academic, occupational, and even athletic success by negatively impacting:

• Visual Discrimination – The ability to discriminate the small differences between objects
• Visual Memory – Retaining a visual record of something observed — a crucial skill for learning
• Visual Sequential Memory – The ability to remember a string of items such as a grocery list, a phone number, or a combination code
• Visual Figure-Ground – Difficulty singling out an object among many, such as a car in a parking lot
• Light sensitivity – Also called photophobia, this is a common condition following a brain injury that makes it unbearable to be outdoors, in a mall, or in a brightly-lit classroom.

Suffering from any of the above symptoms or conditions? Reach out to us today. We can retrain your visual system to overcome these challenges, and help you get back to doing the things you love.

BVD and Vestibular Dysfunction

Do you often feel dizzy or experience vertigo, motion intolerance, a persistent sense of imbalance, or unsteadiness? If so, there’s a chance you may have vestibular dysfunction.

The vestibular system is the system of the body responsible for maintaining balance. Vestibular dysfunction may occur alongside binocular vision dysfunction, and is caused by damage to the vistibular system by disease, viral infection, high doses of certain antibiotics, stroke, degeneration of the inner ear’s balance function, and blows to the head (such as concussions, brain trauma, whiplash). This results in a series of symptoms including:

• Dizziness and vertigo
• Imbalance and spatial disorientation
• Cognitive and psychological changes
• Hearing changes
• Vision disturbance

Concentration issues, memory loss and fatigue can also accompany vestibular dysfunction, with some people even finding it difficult to get out of bed, function properly at school and work or perform routine tasks in environments heavy in visual stimuli (think grocery stores, traffic, shopping malls).

If you have (or suspect you have) vestibular dysfunction and/or suffer from dizziness, unsteadiness or motion intolerance, talk to Dr. Brennan Nelson at Village Eye Centre.

Vestibular rehabilitation and neuro-optometric therapies allow us to retrain the brain, eyes and vestibular system to regain functionality and quality of life for those suffering from visual problems due to vestibular dysfunction.

Want to learn more about what we can do to help you maintain your vision and eye health? Come visit our North Edmonton eye clinic today!