Someone who survived a stroke can face a number of long term health issues. One of those is vision perception problems. What happens is that parts of the brain that are responsible for vision have been affected by the blood clot in your brain.
The brain stem is the home of three nerve pairs that control the movements of your eye. If they are damaged by a stroke and do not allow your eyes to move as one, you can have problems with double vision and visual midline shift.
Perception problems can result from damage to the brain stem and they are known as a group as ocular motility impairments. For instance, double vision is caused when the eyes cannot move into the proper position.
The Safe-T-Mate Personal Safety Alarm can help to alert a caregiver if a stroke patient falls due to a vision or other type of problem.
Damage to your cerebellum can also impair the ability of both your eyes to look in the same direction.
The brain stem and the cerebellum also play important roles in sensation. If there is brain damage in these areas, blinking can be harder, which can cause blurred vision or dry eye.
Common Vision Perception Problems
These include:
- Double vision – This is when a person is seeing double, or two of the same thing. The clinical term for this problem is diplopia. There are several causes of double vision, and they can vary based upon the type of distortion.
- Visual midline shift – A condition where the center point in your line of site is sensed to have shifted left, right, up or down. For instance, if you are looking at the center of a dartboard, you will be looking right at the bulls eye. but someone how had a stroke that affected the brain stem or cerebellum could see the midpoint of her line of sight as a few inches to the left of the bulls eye. In such a case, the person can become dizzy or may tilt her body to the left to compensate.
- Visual neglect – This is where the field of vision is not damaged, but objects in certain areas are not really seen. The patient may fail to observe objects in one area of her vision field. This problem can cause the person to eat only from one side of the plate, brush hair on one side, or shave only 1/2 the face. The good news here is that many stroke survivors can recover completely from this problem.
Other common visual perception problems after stroke include depth and distance perception, color detection issues, hallucinations and dizziness.
Treatments
These eye problems after stroke can be treated in a variety of ways. Some of the more common ways include:
- Prisms
- Therapy and training
- Eye muscle surgery
- Eye patches
These treatments can really help to minimize eye problems after stroke, so be sure to check with your doctor.