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VISION AND POSTURE

Vision profoundly influences muscle tone, stability, and midline orientation. Interventions targeting the complex interplay of eyes, neck, and the vestibular system can lead to remarkable improvements in a child's motor skills, including ambulation, balance, and overall stability.

Strategic interventions in visual dynamics related to the neck and vestibular system aim to induce significant positive changes, enhancing motor development, coordination, and functional abilities.

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VISION AND POSTURE

Tone

The postural tonic system is vital for stability. Dysfunctions in this system can lead to conditions like hypertonia, hypotonia, and dystonia. Optometry can address the tonic system, as the visual system significantly influences it. Specialized prismatic lenses and filters can positively impact posture, stability, and balance, enhancing proprioception and muscle tone for improved postural control.

Ocular convergence

Deficient ocular convergence or misalignment of visual axes can prompt the cervical system to adapt, leading to issues like headaches, cervical pain, and tensions. This affects muscular chains, causing postural misalignments with repercussions on ambulation, stability, and head position. Optometric intervention proves highly effective by organizing the input pathway. Providing precise information to the proprioceptive system, optometry corrects postural adaptations, fostering improved stability.

Stability of the retinal image

Gaze stabilization reflexes maintain visual stability during head movement. Coordination between eyes, vestibular, and cervical systems contributes to stabilizing visual perception, automatically adjusting to head movements. Children with cerebral palsy may have subcortical pathway alterations, making interventions from optometry and osteopathy crucial for stabilizing the retinal image. This enhances movement security and daily life for these children.

Middle line

Patients with cerebral palsy may struggle with spatial perception due to midline shifts caused by brain damage, impacting effective movement coordination. Visual midline shift syndrome results from a mismatch between visual and spatial information processing in the brain. Left untreated, individuals may face balance issues and postural dysfunction. Optometric interventions, including prisms and vision therapy, have demonstrated positive responses in addressing and mitigating these challenges.

SYMPTOMS OF INTERFERENCE BETWEEN VISION AND POSTURE 

  • Headache, migraine

  • Dizziness, dizziness, clumsiness, frequent falls, imbalance.

  • Cognitive disturbance, reading problems, attention problems.  Sensory disturbance, sensation of false movement and instability, double vision with one eye.

  • Problems in locating objects in space, discomfort in crowded places, difficulty walking in wide corridors.

  • Problems in locating one's own body: biting the tongue, lips, bumping into chairs, walking crookedly, tripping over one's own feet, objects falling out of hands easily.

  • Vomiting and nausea.

  • Difficulty in following lines, difficulty in manual work, difficulty in drawing, uncoordinated eye movements.

  • Deficit in ocular convergence: refuses to read, words move, tiredness when doing close work, visual fatigue.

OPTOMETRIC TREATMENT OF POSTURAL PROBLEMS

  1. Yoked prisms: They are used to assist in treatment and functionality in binocular vision problems, accommodative problems and traumatic brain injury, helping to stabilise the visual system, modify head and body posture and gait.

  2. Active prisms: They are used to modify the perception of space by leading the person to change their visual and body posture and to make changes in their general behaviour.

  3. Colour filters: By means of light frequencies, we can affect through the optical pathways to centres of the brain responsible for the different grabitoceptors, and improve tone and posture.

  4. Vision therapy: It offers us different approaches to work on: visual midline, relationship between the visual system and the vestibular system, relationship between the vestibular system and the cervical system. In these cases, learning opportunities can be created to modulate the motor system.

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