The end of summer and the start of the school year can only mean one thing… Football season! For the avid fans, this time of year is a great one as you get to enjoy your team play every Sunday until February. Now with the topic of football, the topic of concussions comes up as well due to the documented issues we now know of. We as eye doctors will get referrals from different types of doctors regarding concussions and the issues that can occur with your eyes. This will be the focus for today’s discussion.
Some of the visual symptoms you can have after a concussion include blurry vision, double vision, inability to read for any length of time, headaches, eyestrain, light sensitivity and an inability to change focus from different distances.
One of the main reasons for these symptoms is that the brain centers that control your eye movement and ability to process what you are seeing are affected. After a concussion, your visual focusing system has changed and your brain and eyes do not match up. This can create the doubling of images along with the eyestrain, headaches, and difficulty adjusting your vision from different distances.
There are a few available treatment options to improve your symptoms and improve the neural network to work properly again. A basic treatment is glasses that are progressives or bifocals and/or prism. The glasses can help reduce the work for your focusing system and move the images for your eye muscles to see single and clearer. Another form of treatment is vision therapy where a specialist can customize a therapy program to rehabilitate your visual system to work again.
These treatments can be done for anybody that needs them including children and adults as sports are for all ages. Many of your your favorite teams have eye specialists on staff to help their players with vision issues or to improve upon their visual performance.
